I have been late on postings but I haz a reason (I have been posting a lot of non-Pagan-y posts, mainly site updates (can they be called updates? Whatevers, it shall be.)) I have mostly finished the cat feeder! The automatic cat feeder that I have been working on for a little over a year. The reason why it took a little over a year is because I kept changing my mind and, thus, changing the design.

For those who are going “What does this have to do with being Black or Pagan?” I made a robot and it didn’t blow up, chuck my cat, murder me, prank call the CIA with terrorist threats, or set anything on fire so hush. (It did throw food at me once and tried to randomly tell the time from 2021). And I’m Black and I’m Pagan, there ya go.

Here is a crappy video of it working:

So crappy, such wow, very amaze. It was late at night, I got tired of setting up things again and again and testing things again and again that I just laid out some aluminum foil for easy clean up and called it a day. All I cared about was not having to solider things together again. I got annoyed that I figured I’d have to 3D print another container for the cat feeder and I’m impatient so I went to the craft store and bought a cardboard box, glue gun, some oven clay (clay that is hardened in an oven). In the video is what you get from all of that. And a hackneyed chute that basically is notebook paper. Eventually, it’s going to have a 3D printed form but I just want this to work now since my 3D printer is away. I’ll eventually have it under the same roof as me, just needs the space for it. Either way, I have a functional robot.

Yes, that is a Pringles can. I usually try to paint stuff and basically make it mine but I am just in the testing/prototype phase so I’m not slapping bolts and BW’s on everything. That and it’s a machine designed to feed my cat – she seriously does not care what it looks like.

Does not care at all

When I originally thought this up, I figured that the cat feeder should have a camera, bluetooth, wi-fi connectivity, two motors and an LCD screen.

A cat seriously does not need all of that. As long as it vomits food once a day, it does not matter to her what it looks like or what it does. So now I have a spare servo motor and teeny LCD screen that’s currently sitting in my project box.

I had coded everything from scratch, which actually didn’t take as much time as I thought it would, especially since I whittled everything down to a single motor and some teeny clock to tell the mini computer the time and when to feed the cat. It’s only 60 lines of code (because I love spaces and gaps). I already have a background in code from since I was in high school (I had one Intro to Tech class, that was it) but I pretty much put it all together with ze power of the internets.

Woo! This is why I took so long posting stuff and suches. The second post will come later. And, look! I 3D printed a water dish for my cat as well.

It’s a gravity watering dish. You use a random soda bottle, fill it with water, flip it upside down and there you go. The dish says filled with water, nothing overflows, I never have to worry about my cat being thirsty because of my forgetfulness.