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Noah Baculi

Software Engineer

Pet Feeder

Automatic Pet Feeder

Designer and Engineer, 2023
Pet Feeder Electronics

My family had three cats, all with different feeding schedules. After seeing the price of commercial automatic feeders, I set out to design my own. I first experimented with different ideas for the sensing and to ensure the electronics would work as expected.

I ended up settling on using an ESP32 WROOM microcontroller and the proximity of a bluetooth tag from Blue Charm Beacons to trigger the opening and closing of the door. I wrote the Arduino (C++) code to manage the logic and it is hosted on my Github.


I then designed the enclosure and door mechanism in CAD to validate the mechanical interactions. Explore the CAD model below:


Next, I started prototyping and manufacturing the physical design using plywood, aluminum L-channel, and acrylic before assembling the mechatronics into the enclosure: