Looking for some advice on a cat food dispenser
I have a simple gravity fed cat food dispenser that is great but it needs a little help. No matter what gravity feed dispenser I use it never keeps up. My cat has food out 24/7 and he regulates his food on his own.
I 3d printed a new dispenser in hopes it would solve the food falling out constantly all day, but it's not working as I expected.
So what I'm hoping to do is make a simple vibrating device that will help the food fall out constantly all day long. Maybe a raspberry pi that has a cell phone vibration fob thing that will run a routine? I don't know. I'm having a really hard time finding examples of this. Does anyone have something to reference?
Also open to ideas on non-mechanical feeders that work well, or very simple battery operated options.
Thanks!
Can you say a little more about what's not working with the gravity fed dispensers? Are they getting jammed?
Also curious what model you printed and if there are specific ways it's failing that could be improved.
It would be interesting to add vibration to the 3d printed design. The first task would be to figure out how much vibration is needed. You could use a low cost adjustable vibrator nsfw link for prototyping. Once you know where vibration is most effective, you could modify the 3d print to accommodate the vibrator.
This is a relatively low cost timer circuit that can be programmed by WiFi. Depending on how comfortable you are with electronics and programming, you could use an Arduino as a timer circuit to control when it runs. You could get fancy and try to sense when more cat food needs to be dispensed or avoid running it when motion is sensed (so it doesn't scare the cat).
If you want help with any of this, DM me. It sounds like an interesting problem to solve.
Thanks so much, let me look around a bit with these links and I will let you know. This is the model I just printed.
https://makerworld.com/en/models/596425?from=search#profileId-518416
I took a look at the model, and the most obvious thing to me to improve the flow is to smooth the joint (at the green arrow in this image.
There's an unused volume behind the chute that is a natural place to house a vibrator (red shape in the picture). If you get a vibrator and can send me the dimensions, I could easily model something up with those changes. Just let me know.
Yeah that's a great point. I'll probably purchase something this week and I'll reach out.
Now my Amazon search and purchase history is going to be trashed lol
Yeah, maybe make a new account and invite it to your "family" if you have prime.
Do you think that timer will work with the low voltage of the AA batteries in the device? 2 AA batteries is 3v and this device and others I could find are 5v and up.
That's a good point. This model goes down to 3v, but also requires buying the programmer (another $20, but there is a rental option mentioned- if you return it within 30 days they will refund everything but shipping.).
That's probably still a simpler route than Arduino+relay board, but it depends on your level of comfort with the electronics.
I don’t have real advice, but I’d make sure your cat is cool with things vibrating, perhaps noisily, before you go through the trouble of building out a Pi-based solution.
For example:
Yeah I was wondering that too. I honestly don't think he would care. This whole thing would help us a lot because at this point our cat is very aggressive when his food is "running low". He comes and finds us and bites our legs. If his food is just always full then he won't bother us, hopefully.
I'm not clear on what your exact issue is. What do you mean by "never keeps up"? From the vibration context I would think that you mean that the food is getting stuck, but you also say that it's falling out constantly all day. Is it just slowly trickling out or something?
It would also be helpful to know a bit more about the design of what you're currently using. It's unclear to me if the slope is just not steep enough or something else is going wrong.
Happy to add context!
Yeah it slowly comes out as my cat eats but never enough, so he is always bugging us to wiggle the container and get more out.
Here is the new dish I printer, it appears to be doing better than the old dish. However it's still not enough.
https://makerworld.com/en/models/596425?from=search#profileId-518416
Interesting. I don't have any personal experience with 3D printing, but it does look a bit shallow to me. Maybe a silly question, but how smooth is that tunnel and into the bottom of the bowl section? I could definitely see this design having some issues with friction.
The print came out very smooth actually. I see what you are saying though. I could probably make it very smooth with some sanding. Something to think about, thanks!
The only thing I can add is to make sure you’ve researched filaments that are people/animal friendly. I personally stay away from using 3D printers for things I will consume, since a lot of PLA is from different plastics. Furthermore food tends to get stuck in the seems between and pores and becomes a breeding ground for bacteria. If you plan on sanding, coating and adding a finish to seal it in, then that may be better.
This might be a silly question, but if your cat regulates his food intake on his own, why not just use a bowl?
My guess is that they are looking to avoid the requirement of getting up and manually filing the bowl whenever it is empty. Our cats get a refill of dry food every morning by us and by god if we forget or (as was the case this morning) they eat it a bit faster than normal, then they will make sure we know and rectify it immediately.
Good question. I would need a pretty big and wide bowl, I was hoping to keep this in a small area and not have a bunch of food sitting out and getting stale.
Slightly different angle on the problem: Are the pieces of dry food large, irregular, or otherwise likely to get jammed up? I've got a paddle-regulated auto feeder, and use this cat food. It's got very small (about 5 mm x 3 mm), regular, disk-shaped pieces.
I had to reduce the number of feeding intervals because this kibble pours so much more easily than the previous dry food, which had what I thought looked like standard-sized pieces.
At the moment I'm thinking they may be getting a little jammed up, but I'm not sure how to test it.
The food we have are little round disc pieces that are like 8mm round by 3mm.
Have you used a dog food dispenser? Like just a bigger one?
One of my cats just learned to headbutt the feeder so I don't have much other advice
Does the opening gets greasy from the cat food, preventing smooth falling?
Maybe gravity food dispensers marketed for dogs have a bigger opening, which makes the flow better.
Actually no the food is pretty dry, but I could print a bigger one, this model can be scaled up in the slicer.
I personally use an older version of one of the Petkit feeders and I'm very happy with it.
https://petkit.com/collections/automatic-pet-feeder
You can set it to automatically dispense by time to certain amounts, force additional dispensing manually or via an app, and have it stop dispensing if the bowl is too full. It also has room for desiccant in the food bucket to help stop it going moldy.