Cat feeder
This was the first Mark Rober project I made. It had to be something purely mechanical and this struck to me. In July 2021 I noticed how every day my cat's food would become stale by staying exposed to the air and later it would go to waste. The only viable solution to this was either buying a feeder from amazon or making one myself and that's exactly that I did.
The mechanical Structure.
The first stage was prototyping. Here I simply built my idea with foam boards and when I thought it looked great I went ahead and designed that in CAD which I later 3D printed.
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There is a basic conveyor system. At the end of the conveyor lay 2 axils which are rotated by a 12v motor. At this stage, the food can travel from its barrel to its month where it can drop.
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Next was figuring how the food would come onto the conveyor. I quickly thought of adding a funnel-shaped barrel at the top which was placed in a way that had a slit between itself and the conveyor just enough so that the food can pass under it in the required quantity.
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Later that week after all the 3D printing I built an external structure made out of fibreboard. This was the perfect material since it was waterproof, strong and soft enough to be cut easily. I placed the conveyor system with its barrel in my fibreboard structure and spraypainted it to look good.
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To make it Alexa controlled I just used a simple smart plug that goes on for 10 secs to give the right amount of food.
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