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DatuX edited this page Jul 13, 2024 · 72 revisions

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TLDR

  • Diet and weigh your cat
  • Cheap
  • Easy to print
  • Easy to assemble
  • Easy to configure

Introduction

The Meowton project was designed to measure the weight of your pets and automatically feed your pets according to their diets.

How does it work?

Check out the youtube channel of my cats to see a demo

  • Each cat has a certain food quota per day. The quota is increased when its feeding time, and decreased whenever the cat is eating.
  • We try to get the cat used to a schedule, but if the cat has quota left it can eat whenever it desires.
  • The scale will identify the cat by its weight. (No RFID support yet, so the weights of the cats should be in different ranges)
  • The cat can keep eating as long as it has quota.
  • The food scale measures exactly how much your cat eats and updates the quota.
  • It creates nice graphs to track your cats weight.

Build instructions

The cat scale

Start with the base plate and cat scale:

Cat scale build instructions.

The food dispenser

  • Can spread a daily food quota out over the whole day.
  • Can dispense fairly small portions. (a few grams)
  • To feed/diet multiple cats and also prevent "cheating" by food stealing, combine with Meowton-cat-scale and Meowton-food-scale.
  • Usuable as a standalone food dispenser for other projects.

Build instructions.

The food scale

  • Can measure amount of eaten food in realtime.
  • Is precise enough to measure weight of individual food chunks.
  • Is build to measure small portions (fits up to 10g?), used in combination with Meowton-food-dispenser.
  • Can be used as standalone generic purpose precision scale for other projects.

Build instructions.

The electronics

  • Always required, unless you use something else.
  • Display is optional. (currently disabled in software, use the webinterface)
  • Based on one ESP32 with micropython.
  • Currently using a breadboard, but ill try to make a nice PCB in the future.

Build instructions.

The software

  • The heart of the operation.
  • Has a nice web interface.
  • Hardware configuration and calibration can be done via the interface.
  • You need to complete the previous modules.

Install and config instructions

The database

  • Can collect food and weight stats.
  • The white line shows average weight measured each day.
  • The green area shows safe weight change range. (currently +/- 1% of body weight per week)
  • The yellow dots is the total of amount of food eaten per day.
  • Uses InfluxDB and Grafana.
  • TODO: I'll try to provide a public database that can be used for free.
  • Example: https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/409BpeEfwtKrdCaWA6GnIHySgh69k2VS

More info.

The RFID scanner

  • Can be used to identify pets if their weight is similar.

Still a work in progress: Reading a pet-rfid-chip while they are eating is a bit difficult but should be possible.

This was the best reader i could find: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/134-2K-Long-distance-RFID-AGV-Animal-Tag-Reader-Module-TTL-Interface-ISO11784-85-FDX-B/32833759686.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dm3EOa9

Its quite expensive and i still wasnt able to read the chip reliable during eating. Have to do some more reseach and testing.

There are other commercial products that use their own solution and coils. Maybe print and wind our own huge coil that the cat can step through? Or under the scale?

Tips and help are welcome.

More info

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