Raspberry Pi Automatic Cat Feeder

Cat feeder is built from clear acrylic and the food hopper is built from plywood. My motivation was running out, otherwise I would have built the hopper from acrylic as well. The feeder runs on a Raspberry Pi, with additional components laid out on an Adafruit Perma-Proto HAT. The auger is from a pellet stove.

The upper white button starts the feeding process, and through trial and error, I played with the auger speed (via Pulse Width Modulation) and turning time to get a pretty consistent 1/2 cup of food each time. The lower button simply turns the auger until the button is released.

Cats can be fed by manually pressing the feed button, automatically on a schedule, or manually via a web interface that is accessed on my phone.

The programming was written in Python, along with PHP for the web interface. I have not connected it yet in this video, but there is a small camera located above the food dish that is connected to the Raspberry Pi via a ribbon cable. A picture from this camera is sent to the web app every minute. All activity is logged via an externally located MySQL server.