Automatic Pet Feeder

I’ve dabbled a little in a few simple Pi projects that were mostly cut and paste before but this was my first full blown project that I had to figure out how to code for. The feeder was designed to dispense food three times a day at specific times and after each feeding it will email me a picture to make sure the food is in the bowl. The main dispenser is a Zevro Dry Food Dispenser which I then powered with a simple geared motor. The motor connects to the Pi via a relay board. The code was pretty easy to figure out (with a little googling anyway). The only part I trouble with was getting the program to run automatically when the Pi was turned on but I finally figured it out with a little help from Reddit. (Unfortunately I really can’t remember what I did to get it to work.)

Overall I am very pleased with how everything came out. I wanted a nice clean looking finished product and I think I achieved that.

The dispenser works of off a rotating paddle shown here.

Every thing is powered off the single 2.5 amp wall wart.

The base, motor mount, camera mount, and feed chute were all custom designed and 3D printed.

The printed camera mounts in place of the original handle.

Here you can see the feed chute and the little black button toward the bottom of the base is the safe shut down button for the Pi.

There is a manual feed button on the top which is mainly for aligning the rotating paddle at start up. The red Led is just to show it is plugged in and powered up, (little did I know that I’d be able to see the Pi’s Leds through the case) and the green Led shows that the program is currently running.

The motor mount is mounted with 3 screws. I will eventually make some thumb screws to make removal of the motor easier as the motor has to be removed first to be able to then remove and clean the hopper and paddle.

If you are interested in seeing the Build Process click HERE.

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