
They also work well for when you’re out of the house and can’t feed your cat at mealtime.
#Auto cat feeder and water full
These ensure your cat’s bowl stays full as long as you stock the reservoir and help you avoid those early morning meow sessions when the food bowl is empty.

The simplest cat feeders are gravity-driven dispensers that automatically refill the bowl as your cat eats. Chewy has the best cat feeders for every cat and any need! We offer a wide selection of all kinds of cat food dispensers, including automatic cat feeders and cat gravity feeders that take the work out of feeding your cat and cat slow feeders that help you put the brakes on how much a chubby kitty can eat. Both contraptions worked extremely well for over a month (including testing time and vacation time.) I’ve now taken apart the cat feeder, though, as it’s not the most aesthetic addition to my kitchen.Make mealtimes easier and more fun for you and your cat with one of the great cat feeders on Chewy. When the cats drink the water level down a bit, the jug can once again equalize its air pressure, and lets more water out. When the water level covers the hole, though, the air pressure can no longer equalize, so the water flow stops. When water flows out, the air pressure in jug decreases until it sucks in some air to equalize. Water flows out of the jug as long as the water level is below the hole at the bottom. Fill with water, seal, then place in a dish greater than one inch high. Punch a pencil-sized hole about 1 inch from the bottom of a large jug. This idea is extremely simple, and is based on the same physical concept that governs most other automatic water dispensers. Binding is no problem, as the food just binds in the trap door.įinally, a cardboard chute directs all of the food into the bowl, and a big cardboard box encloses everything to prevent the cats from getting curious. When the CD Rom closes, the elastic shuts the trap door again. An elastic holds the trap door closed, and the CD Rom tray pushes the door open. However, my primary concern (aside from killing the cats if the idea fails) was that the oddly shaped food pieces might jam the mechanism.įrom there, my second idea was to fill a box with cat food, and have a little trap door at the bottom. My first thought was some sort of rotating mechanism at the bottom of a container to dispense portions from pie-shaped wedges. With that as the basis, the only thing left was to design the physical contraption to actually feed the cats. I was able to use my JasJar PDA phone to SSH into the box, and feed the cats on demand just by running the script. Since it’s a full fledged Ubuntu system on my wireless network, it allowed for an obscene show of technology. It actually does this twice, as I found it made the portions more consistent. The script calls eject /mnt/cdrom to open the CD Rom, delays, and eject –t /mnt/cdrom to close it again. The computer runs Ubuntu Linux, so a crontab entry controls the scheduling.
#Auto cat feeder and water software
It’s also my home’s Subversion source control server – a rare mix of server workloads indeed! It has a CD Rom drive, so I could just use software to open and close it.

But then I had a bootstrapping problem – what can I use to push the eject button of the CD Rom on schedule? After some more thought, I realized that I could just use my spare (working) computer as the basis of the cat feeder. The thought struck me that I could use the ejecting tray of the CD Rom as a solenoid to push the trigger mechanism of some sort of physical contraption. So I went down to my computer junk box in the garage in search of inspiration.Īs I dug around this box, I found an old CD Rom drive and power supply. After applying some electricity, I realized that the motors had nowhere near enough power to move anything significant. At first, I tried playing around with some little stepper motors and gears I had laying around in my electronics toolbox. I stumbled on the nifty hack in Make Magazine that repurposed an old VCR, but it portions out soft cat food – and requires some pretty complex mechanical pieces. I knew that the ‘Maker’ attitude could do better than the expensive pre-made contraptions you can find in stores. Naturally, I looked around the internet first for ideas and plans. So I sought out to make an automated cat feeder and water dispenser out of parts lying around the house.Īs for the cat litter? That’s fine – that can be left to stupid humans :) The Automatic Cat Feeder Despite this, I didn’t want to force my neighbours to come over twice a day to feed the cats. Naturally, for my vacation, I combined the best of both worlds and had one of the neighbours watching my cats. I have two wonderful cats, and many wonderful neighbours.
