Correction: 12 to a bag.
Still working on repurposing a second nightstand into kitchen storage but in the meantime here’s a bit of what I call “sit down crafting”. Mini poly clay bon bons.
Well, I did want to eat them! No user-name jokes, y’all.
This is a work in progress. I’ve been prototyping various ideas for a cat treat dispenser that I can refill easily and which I can hook up to my cat wheel sensor (run on wheel → automatic reward). After several failures, here’s the first version that actually works:
It needs a sensor so it can dispense just one treat at a time, but it works pretty well, and doesn’t jam or grind the treats into dust. Cygnus approves so far.
You told a cat “no” and it respected that “no”? 
Cool prototype! You’ll have to update this once it moves to production.
I agree that the dispenser is cool but the real amazing thing is a cat that listens to you.
I do have a slightly weird cat. He really doesn’t even need the dispenser, and runs on his wheel at all hours for no reward (unless I’m around). He just… likes the exercise. He plays fetch. And while he doesn’t always respond to commands, he at least understands them.
I’ve requested your name change that will still retain the honorific, Dr. Doolittle.
More like Dr. Moreau. That’s not a cat. That’s a hamster/Labrador-mix.
Talk about DIY projects!
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNZkwAQ4s4nO7ZBBnynAud_uh3sq_sZUF7Ut2w_in5o6dIbQ_5KcE80UG9M3MovAg/photo/AF1QipNcgepSb1qctG6yzm3FQjZCYEUUCk9-4ZHpg40v?key=NXM0YjNLNEJDWXVoVGRxNjI2eHBUR3pfSmVmTzlB
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNZkwAQ4s4nO7ZBBnynAud_uh3sq_sZUF7Ut2w_in5o6dIbQ_5KcE80UG9M3MovAg/photo/AF1QipOSsr4C-VV2JjQWcIPty6nSvrRuM63Z_AGoHguh?key=NXM0YjNLNEJDWXVoVGRxNjI2eHBUR3pfSmVmTzlB
Just a few Valentine items I’ve cut this week.
I love the Love Roses.
Replacing ball joints, tie rod ends, shocks, and wheel speed sensors on my 2000 Ford F-150.
I have the same truck, and I’ve done that job. The previous owner never fixed a coolant leak, and just kept adding water, so the engine block is hopelessly rusted. Even after several flushes, it still sheds enough rust to clog the radiator, so I designed and built an in-line coolant filter:
My latest auto project was adding a hidden winch to my ’22 Bronco Badlands:
The dispenser is done:
It’s hooked up to the cat wheel in the background. If Cygnus runs at >8 mph or for >15 seconds, it pops out a treat. The innards are pretty much what you saw earlier; a conical hopper with a conveyor system:
The innards are pretty straightforward. An ESP32 controller, a stepper motor driver, the motor itself, a USB-C plug for power, and one extra bit that I’ll get to:
The overall assembly is pretty much a one-piece 3D print. This was a little tricky since I wanted it to print without any supports, but I largely accomplished that. All overhangs are <45 degrees, which the printer can handle. It was one of my trickiest designs to far and I went through a lot of iterations:
The magic comes from a sensor that I didn’t know existed just a couple of weeks ago:
That little thing is just 2 cm side to side. It’s a LIDAR sensor: it shoots a little laser out the front and measures any distance from 0-100 mm, with precision on the order of a couple of mm.
Incredible! This little thing, which cost about $6, measures the time-of-flight of a laser pulse to a precision on the order of picoseconds. And I’m just using it to detect if a cat treat went by, so I can stop the motor. It’s pretty reliable after some tuning (though occasionally it lets through more than one treat).
The ESP32 runs both a web and telnet server. I can dispense treats by accessing a certain URL or by telnetting in and issuing a command. The cat wheel just requests the URL, throwing away the response, to dispense a treat.
I tried hooking it up to Alexa, but ugh, their development system is hot garbage. Not worth it.
By the way, I did a little writeup of the cat wheel sensor. Check it out here. Or go directly to the results if you’re curious whether Cygnus prefers clockwise or counterclockwise.
That’s all around so cool! I’ve never seen a cat exercise wheel so it was neat to see your extremely black housecat get it going.
BTW, with telnet sending passwords in clear text, you could end up with a super fat cat if your router isn’t up to snuff. Or your black cat starts sniffing local network traffic 
Let’s hope I don’t somehow get DDoSed through my router . That might have actually been a danger had I really poked a hole through my firewall for Alexa…
I kinda wish this guy weighed more. He can get to everything in my place. I was hoping he’d just burn off energy with the wheel, but I think it’s just making him more athletic.
That’s very nicely done.
I used a variation on that sensor to make a water-level meter for our underground water cistern:
I have a German Shorthair Pointer (had multiple other Pointers), and the more exercise they get, the more they need. Just today, we went for a 10 mile hike up a canyon and he did 20 miles with several thousand feet of elevation gain (GPS collar). He is sleeping right now but his batteries recharge quickly. Do they make dog sized wheels?
Nice! It’s amazing to me that this sensor exists at all. I ended up getting half a dozen of them; the cheaper ones are only $3, but I used a version in a smaller/cleaner package that was a tad more.
I attempted to use a more traditional IR emitter/receiver system in an earlier version. You can see some of the prototypes have “wings” on the sides of the chute which were intended to contain some IR boards. But it was never reliable (partly because the boards were junk, and partly because I think it was just a bad system). The LIDAR sensor made one-sided sensing possible, and is way smaller and easier to fine tune (I2C registers instead of messing with various analog stuff).
I’ll probably end up using these for a bunch of stuff, like maybe a gesture recognition system for my computer.