Cat Feeder Frame

As much as I liked Kitlaan's feeder design, it really showcased my lack of wood-working abilities to make a suitable frame.

I designed this frame so that anyone who prints his auger design can also print a box to hold it in. The back of the box has a built-in slot to hold an Arduino Pro Mini, and in my experience I found best results when cutting the PVC 'T' connection to 97mm, and putting the auger into the short end.

The food-storage 'hopper' that stores the food is a Cupcake Pen (sold under the exact same design but with a different color cover as a Pancake Pen) and I used Aubenc's Poor Man's Openscad Screw Library and a bit of trial and error to match the threads on the bottom of the 'Pen'. I no longer have the original scad file I used to make the threads, but the dimensions are in the file name of the stl file.

The 'LE-DOME' files that are included are nice little caps for 5MM LED's, and when printed in clear PLA they serve as a nice diffuser for the LED's. The green LED in the picture is tied to the feeder's 5V supply, so it's always on when the feeder is plugged in. I set the red LED so that it fades, starting at full brightness as soon as food is dispensed, and slowly fading until the time until next feed runs out, at which piont it will be zero.

I designed/printed the bowl after seeing that the cat, always being hungry (we're not starving our cat, we're just trying to get the fat bastard down below 16lb) would move the bowl out from under the feeder, usually resulting in kitty food spread across the floor. My solution was to add a magnet bowl to the design, which keeps the bowl attached to the frame but is still removable for cleaning.

Print 1x each of the stl files attached, with the exception of the sides - print two of them.

Other requirements are:

-A Pancake/Cupcake pen (I found these at World Market, they're easily available on Amazon.com as well)

-4x hobby magnets. The STL files will take 1/2" diameter x 1/8" thick disk magnets. I got these at Hobby Lobby, but if you can't find equivalent than the scad file could be modified to accept what you get (I'm sure the Scad could me done much more eloquently, but I'm still learning here). Two magnets will go inside the front plate, and two magnets will go in the slots of the bowl. I'm hoping that these will stay in place without any glue, I think that should be achievable.

-1x the feeder as outlined in Kitlaan's feeder that this is derived from. I'm using an HS-311 servo modified for continuous rotation and it seems to have sufficient torque. I did find that I had to trim down the edges of the auger, specifically where the two halves come together, to avoid them catching on the inside of the PVC and stalling the motor.

-1x momentary button switch

-2 x LED's. These weren't installed initially, but at one point the cat moved the feeder and actually unplugged it, and then went a day without food as we didn't notice. Having an LED is good to ensure that the thing is plugged in.

The assembly is pretty obvious. I used 2-56 screws to hold it all together. On the top and bottom piece I reamed out the holes so the screw would pass through, and then the screws self-tap into the sides/front/back pretty easily