This project is an automated dog feeder. It is very basic. However should be useful on those rare occasions when I'm away for one night and need to feed the dog.

The dog feeder itself is very simple, it is a tube filled with dog biscuits with a trap door that is operated by a servo when the esp8266 receives a MQTT message. It just so happened that the day after I made the dog feeder I received a late Christmas present - a Google Home Mini.

So I did some googling and discovered it is possible to chain together various IOT / home automation tools to send MQTT messages. I used:
1. Google home - recognises the phase "feed the dog" and sends to IFTTT
2. IFTTT then sends a webhooks (http) request to a page on my RPI Node-Red instance
3. Node-Red acts as a HTTP to MQTT bridge and sends a MQTT message (via mosquitto also on the RPI)
4. ESP8266 - receives the message and operates the servo, feeding the dog.
I can also schedule using node-red or direct via MQTT.