Automatic Pet Feeder
Designer and Engineer, 2023
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:
