Check out this DIY automated cat feeder

That people love their pets is something I learned when I was young.

When on vacations, my mom would call our home phone and leave daily voicemails for our cats, Sophia and Kittenger, so they’d hear her voice and not get lonely. That was a fairly low-tech solution, but this was the ’90s, after all.
These days, thanks to an enterprising, cat-loving, Brooklynite, you might soon be able to program your pets’ feeding schedules when you’re out of town.

First test of the cat feeder…. IT WORKS. pic.twitter.com/iWiwR2SrNn

— rachel (@ohhoe) November 29, 2015

It’s called the Robokitty and it’s the work of Rachel White. With the Robokitty you can program the feeder to dispense food every two hours or four hours or eight hours, or just with the push of a button from wherever you are.
“I’ve never worked with hardware before,” White wrote, describing the project. “I’ve never built a node app from scratch. I’ve never used socket.io. I’ve never soldered. And the list goes on. But I did it. And even though many mistakes were made, I still learned a ton and figured out the bugs in the end. There’s something seriously satisfying about building something technical and getting to hold it in your hands.”

Solved the jamming problem by having the servo turn in opposite direction briefly on start 😎 pic.twitter.com/ySOD0fAwVj

— rachel (@ohhoe) November 30, 2015

White put the whole project on GitHub, so anyone interested can do some tinkering of their own.
“This whole project is open source, because I want people to build their own and continue to contribute to the library to be able to add on cool modules and other fun things,” White wrote.
And, though it is geared towards cats, the Robokitty could have some species scalability…

getting a live demo of robokitty, in which @ohhoe clicks a button to feed @noSlouch, "like a cat". https://t.co/79bCHzuKCP

— Jed Schmidt (@jedschmidt) December 6, 2015