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Automated Liquid Dog Food Dispenser

A liquid dog food dispenser to deliver small amounts of food at regular intervals.

opticoptionopticoption
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We have a dog with an esophageal stricture. She requires a liquid diet that is delivered in small doses to prevent vomiting. This is tedious and time consuming. I'd much rather build a machine to do this.

The plan is to build a small device which will keep the liquid food mixed in a hopper. The user can set a pour period and pour amount which will be dispensed via gravity into a dish.

This is a run down of the basic hardware I'm looking at.

Raspberry Pi Zero for the brains. This is massive overkill, processing wise, but it's still only $5 and I've been wanting to play with one. I may replace it after the initial build.

Solenoid Valve to control food flow. The food we use has suspended particulates throughout so I'm a little concerned about clogging. Alternative suggestions welcome.

Plastic Enclosure to hold all the control bits. Will drill necessary holes to mount switches and displays.

7-Segment LED Displays to show the pour time and interval.

Rocker Switches to adjust settings.

  • Raspberry Pi Zero is Here

    opticoption • 08/04/2016 at 21:53 • 0 comments

    So my Pi Zero came in about a week ago. I've put an image of Raspbian on an SD card and borrowed a USB hub for the keyboard and mouse. I really wish I had some spares but I'll just bite the bullet and take them off my PC temporarily.

    I took Bharbour's advice and ordered a peristaltic pump. It won't arrive potentially until September. I guess that's the downside of ordering from China. Until then I'm going to put together the bones of the control software in C++ and check the GPIO output with a simple multi-meter. I should put up a Github repository to share the bit of code it should take, just in case anyone is curious.

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Bharbour wrote 07/12/2016 at 21:03 • point

Nice project idea. You might look at using a peristaltic pump instead of gravity feed and a solenoid valve. They are easy to build. easy to clean and tolerate solid matter in the liquid pretty well. They also can give a fairly accurate output volume. Good Luck!

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