Hi all,

Here is my latest creation an AI powered cat feeder :)

Inside is a 3D printed mechanism with an auger allowing to push out the pellets.
a servo rotates gears and the auger which is into a PVC pipe.

Cat is detected with a neural network running on an old android phone.
The camera runs in real time and performs cat face detection

When the cat is detected then the auger can run and feeds the cat (only twice a day)

And the phone streams your cat over internet so you can see it eating !

More details here :
https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/jg-ecatfeeder.87088/#post-551293

[edit] It was Xmas for my cat...

A drawback of previous design was that I was always feeding the cat with the same amount of food. So sometimes too much when the cat wasn't hungry...

I decided to mod a little my cafeeder to add a balance to weight the food.
A simple load cell + a Hx711 interface circuit, and now :

• always the same quantity of food into the plate
• a real time monitoring of the weight which allows to detect the cat "eating" and to post a notification for the camera streaming

• a detection of empty tank plus a notification to alarm you on your phone

  How I Designed This

  print it

  All is printed in PLA excepted the auger and the gears which are in ABS

  Auger is cut horizontally printed and then acetone glued
  the big gear is acetone glued to the auger and screwed to it

  A pvc pipe is inserted in the main frame and a slot is cut to allow pelets to fall

hardware

The front face is equiped with a PIR sensor and an android smartphone (screen is dead but the camera works !)

software

Most of the time everything sleeps : NO power when in sleep mode

• The PIR sensor wakes up the ESP8266
• if it's time (NTP connection) to feed the cat, then the ESP8266 sends a firebase notification
• the smartphone is registered to this notification. It wakes up
• a face cat detection is launched (real time OpenCV lib) : my cat on the picture :-)
• if it is a cat then the smartphone which has connected to the ESP8266 via UDP, sends a feed notification
• the ESP8266 launches the auger rotation
• and meanwhile the smartphone streams a video of your beloved cat over internet !

• then smartphone and ESP8266 go back into deep sleep mode ! load cell to weight the food