[Scott Cutler] has a younger cat, [Cygnus], that loves to run on a cat wheel and [Scott] had some some essential queries about [Cygnus]’s usage of the cat wheel like, how normally it is made use of, what course is preferred and how fast does [Cygnus] go. To respond to these queries, [Scott] place some telemetry sensors on to the cat wheel and analyzed the effects.
An ESP8266 microcontroller and two 3144E hall outcome modules ended up made use of to sense 8 magnets glued onto the outer housing of a “One Rapid Cat” cat wheel. [Scott] mounted the ESP8266 and hall impact modules on to the base guidance for the wheels, employing 3D printed brackets to safe them.
For the software aspect, the ESP8266 attaches an interrupt handler anytime a sensor passes by, recording a window of three previous measurements for valid sample perseverance and, if approved, uses the time between samples to infer way and velocity. The ESP8266 connects to a pre-configured neighborhood WiFi community and has a telnet interface to extract stored log information, in the variety of JSON knowledge.
[Scott] has some good graphs and other information visualizations on [Cygnus]’s utilization, which include a desire for managing at 3 AM, obtaining a greatest velocity of 14 mph and an ordinary of 4 seconds for each operate. The supply is obtainable on GitHub and the STL data files are offered embedded in [Scott]’s produce-up. We have highlighted cat exercising trackers just before with a large hamster wheel outfitted with a Raspberry Pi and it is great to see some selections that allow for a retrofit selection in addition to a comprehensive Diy remedy.
