Smart Pet Feeder - Waylay IO

Description

We love our pets, for many of us, they are a part of our family with full rights. While at home, you can easily sense their wishes and basic needs, but being remote is something else. Feeding them involves asking neighbours or close friends. Enough of that!

Let's build a smart pet feeder to automate food dispensing at certain intervals, monitor the pet’s eating habits, and train the pet to press a button to receive food.

The main purpose of this tutorial is to get you started on IoT development using the Waylay IO low-code platform.

If you need help in deploying this solution or building something similar please contact Waylay.io for the low-code IoT Solution or Zalmotek.com for IoT-enabled hardware prototypes.

Let’s get started!

Components

Build Instructions

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1

Hardware requirements

For this tutorial, we have decided to use the M5Stack Ecosystem because it offers the possibility of building such a system without prototyping specific tools, such as a soldering iron or prototyping cables. The brain of this project is the M5Core2, an IoT development kit based on the ESP32 microcontroller. This ecosystem allows you to connect the provided modules through a GROVE port to the M5Core2, allowing fast deployment of hardware.

The modules we’ve picked for this tutorial are M5Stack’s LEGO-compatible Servo Kit 360° as the actuators for dispensing the food and the Mini Dual Button Unit as the input modules the pet will interact with.
2

Enclosure(s) for food - 3D prints

We have adapted the very nice 3D printed Servo Screw system done by this user on Thingverse. We only printed one for demo purposes, but you can print two to have different flavours of food or maybe food and water. We have used a plastic bottle to store the food on top of the adapter. Yay, upcycle!
3
Wire Connections
- Connect the Mini Dual Button Unit to PORT A of the M5Core2 (the red port near the USB-C connector) using the Grove cable.
- Take out the CORE2 plate on the back to expose the pins.
- Connect one of the servo motors using the male to male Dupont wires to the following pins:
```
BROWN  - GND
RED    - 5V
YELLOW - G25
```
- Connect the other servo motors using the male to male Dupont wires to the following pins:
```
BROWN  - GND
RED    - 3.3V
YELLOW - G26
```