Pet Feeder with ESP8266

Does your pet (as well as mine) don’t give a s**t that it’s a weekend and you’d like to sleep longer? My cat (Strachu) – every Saturday at 7 a.m. sings a serenade “I’m hungry!!”. And he doesn’t get any logical arguments that you went to bed late yesterday because: (cross out false one) you were at a party / you worked / your child didn’t let you sleep.

Today I’m gonna show you how I built your own Pet Feeder. You can integrate it with any "Smart" System you have.

Introduction

The idea of Smart Homes is to facilitate everyday routine activities. One of them undoubtedly is pet feeding. Automatic “Smart” Pet Feeder integrated with the Smart System in your home gives many possibilities for doing it.

• You can set up a detailed meal schedule.
• You can put the food automatically after detecting a pet near the bowl. Although in this case, a lot depends on the pet itself. My Starchu would probably live by the bowl just to keep the food flowing. Yes, he is the biggest glutton on the street 🙂
• You can also just sprinkle some cat food remotely using your smartphone at any time and from anywhere.

Without further ado, let’s get down to business!

Electronics

In this project, the schematic is straightforward. There’s nothing too complicated here.

The main "brain" is an ESP12F module with an ESP8266 chip on board. It controls the 28BYJ-48 stepper motor via the ULN2003 driver, reads data from the PIR module, supports the button, LED, and the Buzzer. And it communicates with our Smart Home via WiFi.

The Stepper Motor is powered by 5V, the rest 3.3V. That’s why I put a pulse DC-DC converter at the input, so the power range is quite broad: from 6.5 to 32V.

Mechanical design

Printing takes about 18 hours, so congratulations on your persistence 🙂. It’s time to put them together. Apart from the printed elements themselves, you’re gonna need a few M2.5 and M3 screws, a screwdriver, and cyanoacrylate glue (Superglue).

Step 1

First, we gonna mount the flap frame on the top edge of the container.

Step 2

Do the same on the other side, but glue the funnel this time.

Step 3

Place the worm gear into the main body, and then insert the funnel with the container into the slot.

Step 4

Place the Lid on and fasten it with four M2.5/10mm screws.

Step 5

You’re gonna need four M3/6mm screws to attach the PCB.

Step 6

The legs can be made of wood, aluminum, 3D printed, or anything else. The diameter of this should be 10 mm, and the length depends on the high of your pet’s bowl. In my case, 60 mm is the perfect length.

Step 7

Slide the body into the groove of the top of the PCB box.

Step 8

Connect the stepper motor, and slide the motor cover down.

Step 9

Close the container with the flap, and you’re done.

Washing the Pet Feeder

Because it is a food-related device, it would be appropriate to wash it once in a while. I wanted to be able to separate the electronic part from the “food” part in seconds and without any tools.

All you need is three steps:

• Slide the stepper motor cover upwards.
• Pull out the stepper motor.
• Pull the entire body of the device forward.

This way, you can safely wash the inside of the device without the fear of getting the electronics wet.

That's it! :)

Where can I find more information?

You can find even more details about this project here:

https://smartsolutions4home.com/ss4h-pf-pet-feeder/