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Linux-Based Cat Feeder

Posted by timothy on Mon Feb 14, 2005 07:09 PM
from the happy-valentine's-day dept.
Toys Software It's funny. Laugh. Linux
prostoalex writes "Chris McAvoy is a UNIX administrator and an owner of two cats. So as a natural application of his work to his hobby he built this Linux-based cat feeder. A little hardware hacking and Python scripting can get you a device that would automatically disperse a yummy fish at specified intervals."
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  • Sounds like... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nuclear305 (674185) * on Monday February 14 2005, @07:10PM (#11673417)
    Someone has been watching too much Back to the Future.

    Nice to see some tech details instead of just pretty pictures though.

    • Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Asgard (60200) <jhmartin-s-5f7bbb@toger.us> on Monday February 14 2005, @07:21PM (#11673529) Homepage
      Or from another TV series:


      Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
      Cat: Fish!
      Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
      Cat: Fish!
      [...]


    • Microsoft is coming out with this too... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PHPgawd (744675) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:28PM (#11673596)
      In order to stay current with all Linux features, Microsoft Feed (tm) will be bundled with the next major release of Windows.

      The early insider-only reviews contain the following highlights:

      • The feeder dispenses 70kg of food at a time no matter what size cat you have.
      • Users of the feeder must use Microsoft CatChow (tm) or an authorized, licensed, compatible cat food (MS-ALCCF). Non-Microsoft licensed cat foods "may" cause your cat to crash.
      • The feeder contains hidden, Microsoft-only APIs to connect to Microsoft LitterBox (tm) and Microsoft ScratchingPost (tm). These products will be available early next year.
      • To show Microsoft's committment to open standards, any kind of water may be used with the Feeder product, although Microsoft may "extend" the Water Standard anytime in the future in incompatible ways.
      • hard to type and giggle at the same time but I gotta add that I would have been more worried about a DOS attack on the fish server. or If someone hacks the cron job and the system has piled up 40 lbs of formerly fresh mackerel on the kitchen floor by the time you get back from a summer weekend at the beach...eyuuch!
        • Years ago I got up in the morning and started my commute to work. As I got into the car I detected a faint fishy smell. Twenty miles from work it was a bit stronger. Then miles and I knew something was up. Was it some weird weather that wafted the scent of rotting whales in from the coast two hundred miles distant? Five miles from work and my eyes started to water, as I catch an aroma like there's a fish sauce convention nearby. I finally get to work and notice the hazmat teams in the downtown district of the city where I worked.

          Turns out that digging the basement for a new downtown building had broken into two 100+ year old fish oil tanks from 100+ year defunct fish oil company. The downtown was pretty much closed for the entire week. Nasty, nasty, nasty. It was like goatse for the nostrils...

      • You forgot... (Score:5, Funny)

        by NoseBag (243097) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:57PM (#11673798)
        ... Encoding in the 70Kg food cartridge will automatically expire in 60 days - necessitating the purchase of additional Tasty-Gates(tm) cat food.

    • Re:Sounds like... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei (128717) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:56PM (#11673793) Homepage
      The thing is, 75$ just for the board... and then all of the other parts? Geez... I'm cheap; here's what I'd try:

      Parts:
      1 cheapo X10 device
      1 used electric hand mixer
      1 rubber band
      1 empty round plastic food container (yogurt, pudding, etc)
      string (best if with good traction; glued/tied rubber band would be best?)
      "anything sticky/tacky and puttylike or rubberlike that will stay put" (henceforth referred to as "putty")
      1 short dowel rod piece
      Other wood (or even legos) for mounting

      Plug in the X10 device and set it to code a1 (or whatever). Plug the mixer into it. Turn the mixer on low (the X10 device should be off at this point). Securely mount the mixer to the wood, with blades facing forward. Attach putty to the narrow part of the blades, with ridges of putty surrounding a thinner area (to keep a belt in position). Further up on your wood mounting, drill a hole large enough for your dowel to slide in loosely, and insert the dowel. Put putty or a nail on both sides of the dowel to stop it from sliding out of the hole. Mount your empty food container on the other end of the dowel. Cut a small hole, only large enough for one treat to pass through at a time, in the container near its lip. Near the base of the container, add "putty" in the same way you did with the mixer blades. Cut string/rubber band and make a loop between the mixer and the food container; the wider container will gear down the fast mixer. Directly above the food container, mount the container of treats with a hole cut in the bottom such that it directly skims the food container where the hole is, so that when the container is precisely aligned, a treat will fall through. Through proper gearing and possible additional placement of putty, etc, one should be able to ensure that a single treat falls through as the container spins past. If the container doesn't have enough of a slope to ensure that the treat falls out of it after entering, putty or other material can increase the slope.

      Script:
      #!/bin/bash
      echo 1 > /dev/x10/a1
      sleep 1
      echo 0 > /dev/x10/a1

    • Redundant (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nailer (69468) on Monday February 14 2005, @09:12PM (#11674288)
      cat already accepts stdin on Unix.

      What'd be more interesting is tac - which works like cat, except backwards ;^).

    • Fake alert!!! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Gaardenzwerch (470646) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @04:19AM (#11675768)
      This is obviously a spoof!
      UNIX administrator and an owner of two cats

      Anyone with cats knows that this should read:
      UNIX administrator and
      owned by two cats

  • I want chicken, I want liver... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ShatteredX (788982) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:11PM (#11673426)
    Linux, Linux, please deliver~

  • Feeding time (Score:5, Funny)

    by mesach (191869) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:11PM (#11673429)
    I thought that feeding time was the only time that most cats paid any attention to you. Why on earth anyone would want to take that away I will never know.

  • Cat feeder (Score:5, Funny)

    by cyberfunk2 (656339) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:11PM (#11673430)
    I'd ask if this was completely nessicary, but knowing the forgetful habbits of nerds...

    Hell I'm suprised fluffy aint dead already.

  • cat food /dev/cat (Score:5, Funny)

    by delire (809063) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:12PM (#11673431)

    there, i said it

      • Re:cat food /dev/cat (Score:5, Funny)

        by Coryoth (254751) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:53PM (#11673772) Homepage Journal
        cat food > /dev/cat

        Now if you were a serious UNIX and hardware hacker you'd have your cat feeding system work by regsitering the food dispenser as /dev/cat, have the raw byte instruction sequence required to make the dispenser operate stored in a file /food, and then, indeed, you simply add

        30 9,18 * * * cat /food > /dev/cat

        to your crontab.

        Jedidiah.

          • Re:Wrong device (Score:5, Funny)

            by Coryoth (254751) on Monday February 14 2005, @11:13PM (#11674888) Homepage Journal
            I tried that, but apparently I have Speedy Gonzales attached to my machine and the cat is struggling:

            bash$ cat /dev/mouse

            cat: /dev/mouse: permission denied

            If the cat has to get permission from the mouse, there are always going to be problems.

            Jedidiah.

  • OK, so my only question is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by oGMo (379) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:13PM (#11673444)

    What does it feed the cats to?

  • Litter box (Score:5, Funny)

    by lsmeg (529105) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:13PM (#11673451)
    So can you also set up a cron job to clean the litter box?
    • > So can you also set up a cron job to clean the litter box?

      No need for cron even-- just get Litter Robot [litter-robot.com], the self-cleaning robotic litterbox! It looks futuristic...oddly like one of those pods from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But does it run linux?

      • Re:Litter box (Score:5, Funny)

        by ari_j (90255) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:30PM (#11673610)
        self-cleaning robotic litterbox ... does it run linux?

        I don't know, but as long as nobody makes a Beowulf cluster of them, I'll be happy.

    • Re:Litter box (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MsWillow (17812) on Monday February 14 2005, @08:02PM (#11673831) Homepage Journal
      Actually, we recently bought a (used) litterbox that cleans itself. Found out why they got rid of it - the electronics were fried (something about a +5v regulator, sans heatsink, that croaked). Anyways, Vikki mapped out all the connections, replaced the regulator and a handful of semiconductors, then wrote code for a PIC. She also designed and etched the circuit board, and put it all together. It now works great!

      While it doesn't run Linux, all the work was done using tools she has for her Gentoo Linux box. The cats really like it, too - they often crowd around to watch the magic litterbox at work. This makes my life, as litterbox shoveller, a lot easier :)

  • Overkill. (Score:3, Funny)

    by David M. Sweeney (105063) <slashdot.sweeneysoft@com> on Monday February 14 2005, @07:14PM (#11673461) Homepage
    Hardware hacking and Python? Pfft. All he had to do is this:

    % cat < /tmp/tastyFish

    What are they teaching young admins in college these days, anyway?

  • something that feeds off cats (Score:5, Funny)

    by pyrrho (167252) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:15PM (#11673475) Journal
    and it runs linux!!!

    finally a solution to the feral cat problem! Open Source ROCKS!!!

    and I think my dog will love it... she doesn't seem that fond of cats.

    what? read the article? excuse me... I only read titles... I'm American! If you don't get the meaning in that title... that's your bad.

    anyway... cat eating robots... my god what will they think up next!?

  • Word choice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ari_j (90255) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:16PM (#11673481)
    I understand that the submitter is just confused between dispense [m-w.com] and disburse [m-w.com], but I know for a fact that I never want a fish, yummy or otherwise, dispersed [m-w.com] in my home.

    • insightful? (Score:4, Funny)

      by pyrrho (167252) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:33PM (#11673634) Journal
      I thought it was funny.

      from a slashdot perspective it's insightful... a lot of geeks just went... "good point... perhaps I should modify my fish dispersal plans"

  • Just another way.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2005, @07:16PM (#11673482)
    ..to get more time with your computer and ignore the only other living thing(s) in your household?

  • Cat fish? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead (54550) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:16PM (#11673489)
    > A little hardware hacking and Python scripting can get you a device that would automatically disperse a yummy fish at specified intervals

    Bah. On my system, cat [zevils.com] and fish [zevils.com] come preinstalled.

    So all I need to do for the specified interval bit is add a line to my crontab that looks something like this:

    1 * * * * "cat /usr/local/bin/fish | twofish | blowfish > seuss.fish"

  • It could be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by angedinoir (699322) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:17PM (#11673494)
    the closest a linux geek ever gets to pussy.

  • Food in tin cans (Score:5, Funny)

    by saddino (183491) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:18PM (#11673505)
    This reminds me of the old UNIX joke:


    $ cat "food in tin cans"
    cat: cannot open food in tin cans

    Of course, BSD's "cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory" doesn't have quite the same effect.

  • Coral Cache Mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by jong99 (848508) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:21PM (#11673532)
    http://www.linuxjournal.com.nyud.net:8090/article/ 7403 [nyud.net]

  • Dispersing (Score:5, Funny)

    by pbalzac (463452) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:21PM (#11673535)
    a device that would automatically disperse a yummy fish

    Over how wide an area?

  • Red Dwarf says cat wants many fish! (Score:5, Funny)

    by fermion (181285) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:23PM (#11673553) Homepage Journal
    Machine: Hello. How can I help you?
    Cat: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: Fish!
    M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
    C: I will!

    cats, like basement trapped boys, have little else to do than figure out how to hack the machine.

  • Mirrordot Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by superatrain (842910) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:24PM (#11673559) Journal
    Mirrordot mirror [mirrordot.org]

  • Now you need a cat exerciser (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frank T. Lofaro Jr. (142215) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:25PM (#11673570) Homepage
    Can't have the cat eating and not exercising, that wouldn't be too healthy.

    Too bad using a laser to exercise a cat is patented [freepatentsonline.com]. :)

  • Peronsally, (Score:5, Funny)

    by robyannetta (820243) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:28PM (#11673589) Homepage
    Personally, I'd like to see one of those robotic self-cleaning litter boxes hacked with their own version of linux. Think of the possibilities!

    You can program it to a solenoid on the front door. If someone opens the door, the robotic scooper is automatically put in "turbo" mode, rakes and shoots a sandy shit at you at 50mph. Hacking. It's just not for coffee machines anymore.

  • Prepositional playfulness... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Colz Grigor (126123) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:30PM (#11673609) Homepage
    I've heard of feeding cats to pythons, but this is definitely the first time I've read about feeding cats with Python!

    ::Colz Grigor

  • Cliche alert... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Linker3000 (626634) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:38PM (#11673668)
    Wow...imagine a feral pack of those!

  • That's nothing (Score:3, Funny)

    by EnronHaliburton2004 (815366) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:47PM (#11673731) Homepage Journal
    Man hacks computer to feed cat.

    That's nothing.

    My cat hacks on my computer all the time.

  • Should have used Mac OS X (Score:4, Funny)

    by snuf23 (182335) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:48PM (#11673741)
    Given the low cost of the mini, is there really any excuse to do this on a Linux box?
    Some big, ugly, noisy PC, ugh.
    The small form factor makes it ideal for projects like this. And it's so quiet you can still hear your cat purring when it sits right on top of the mini.
    I mean considering the solid BSD based nature of OS X and the elegant Apple aesthetic, I really think the cat would be more likely warm up to a new iFeeder rather than some generic Linux POS box.
    I think iTunes integration would be pretty easy to do to. This is a serious advantage that no other OS can offer. Then kitty can be informed of cat food refresh by the playback of an appropriate song. Perhaps something by the Jingle Cats?
    I'm currently working on a mod I call the iFlush which uses the mini to automate the process for toilet flushing. The great thing is how well the mini's white and silver style complement my porcelain and steel bathroom environment.

  • Link to the web interface (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bushcat (615449) on Monday February 14 2005, @07:57PM (#11673801)
    From the web interface to the feeder at http://kittens.lonelylion.com/index.py, the cats seem to be getting around 2 fish treats per second right now. That's two happy kitties, unless they're caught in the dispenser's paddles, of course.

  • Wait!

    Does it run Lin...

    Oh, wait, never mind....

    Somebody HAD to say it!

  • The beauty of cats is they can ration their food. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheLittleJetson (669035) on Monday February 14 2005, @08:06PM (#11673852)
    A cat is safe at the house for the weekend if you leave plenty of food and water. A dog, will eat all the food when he sees it then puke.

    Linux-based dog or fish feeder would have been more useful. :-)

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