UPDATE: I am no longer doing business with Tindie, they have turned out to be liars, in reality they allow non-open source products on this platform for no reason, and when I raised the issue they were bafflingly nasty about it. Totally unprofessional, and clearly the whole operation is little more than a scam.

This is a cat feeder that is clog-proof, and gives consistent feed quantities. It has a wifi interface. It uses a Raspberry pi Pico W with micropython. It is mechanically very reliable.

This is about the same price as the most popular feeder on amazon, the petlibre with a 2 liter kibble capacity, after tax. Unfortunately it is true that shipping will add more, amazon gets a crazy good deal on shipping which is completely unfair to everyone else in the world. The parts alone are about $30 CAD so I can't sell it for less, even at this price it's a hobby, not a profitable undertaking.

I'm just doing this because open source hardware and livingry has been a passion of mine for some time. I did this in a way which although it is a minor appliance illustrates a better way to do things. Any part can be replaced and repaired into the distant future. I used the best low-cost components I could. Modular, well tested and open source, reliable.

You don't have to worry about:

• failing to connect to wifi. The raspberry pi pico is all designed by the raspberry pi foundation to be broadly compatible, if anything works with your router, it will. If the wifi standard or whatever changes, they will release a patch which you can apply. (it doesn't support 5 ghz networks but almost every 5 ghz device also supports 2.4 ghz).

• some crazy limitation like not being able to dispense enough food per meal or only at points 15 minutes apart, or serious clock time drift (all real examples).

• the cat cannot circumvent anything or defeat the system, there are no buttons they can press or mechanisms they can reach in and move.

• it will not spill if tipped over

• no wacky variations in dispensing quantities

It sets the time automatically from the internet. You have to connect over usb to configure it on first boot, but you can change the feeding times through your browser or administer a single scoop whenever you want thereafter.

You can return it if you don't like it or whatever, no worries.

This is for an actual device, it's already made. There will be some leadtime of ~5 days or something to get the packaging and bring it to the post office etc.

I appreciate that you can get cheap feeders for less $, however the cheap ones have a lot of issues, and this one is for the rare person who appreciates the unique benefits of this device, and for whom money is not the most dominant concern. You can also get feeders for $500 each that probably aren't any better for a lot of purposes.

When I needed an auto cat feeder I groaned at the idea of buying a cheap one because you get so many issues, and even the amazon reviews don't reveal a lot of them. But if you check the one and two star reviews, that's exactly what always happens to me.

What almost always happens is that I buy cheap thing after cheap thing, the price and total expenditure and time invested rising to the point where I could have designed and made my own. I skipped to the end, this time.

Unique benefits include:

- high precision feeding.

- high mechanical reliability, very simple mechanism. If I may say so the mechanism is rather clever, actually.

- open source, very hackable.

- it's cool because it's artisan made with independence.

- no planned obsolescence, should work great for a long time and it's easy/cheap to fix if you break something.  this includes if you step on it really hard or something and break something, you can still fix it.  Or if lightning fries the electronics or whatever. It's like one of those old toasters, made to last forever.

Other benefits include:

• Easy to program. You can even copy and save your meal program, and view it over the web browser.
• it reports dispensing success over the web page and MQTT so you an verify operation on some level

To be honest, the main limitation is that it has a kibble capacity of only about 1.3 liters. However that's still a lot of food for most cats, especially if you don't use it for all meals in a day. I use mine only to feed the morning meal.

I am finding it handy to dispense a single scoop, this is useful to redirect unwanted behaviours. I use my phone to command it to dispense a single scoop by going to the ip address in my browser and clicking the button that says "serve 1 scoop". This only gives 1.6 grams of kibble. This distracts Raven, my cat, from doing things I don't want him to do like jumping on the counter. This is a recommended approach, the cats are not usually smart enough to associate the unwanted behavior with the food. I read this in the book Decoding your Cat, by the American Animal Behaviourist society.

Note: the shipping probably won't cost $27 usd. I don't know how Tindie does that. You can use the Canada Post shipping calculator, I am in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada.

This does not include the USB power supply or micro usb cable, because almost everyone has at least one spare kicking around so we might as well use that and that would add even more to the cost, and imply additional shipping of more stuff unnecessarily around the globe.

Even a cheapie 1 amp power supply is fine, but some really cheap ones don't work.

All source code and cad files are on the google drive, which is linked to from the source code section.

I made a quick manual here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17QiroeNo5WMtZf4q4UaK647KNackGohmk6WM-z2dj-0/edit?usp=sharing