KibbleKeeper

Inspiration

As pet owners, we were frustrated with existing automatic feeder solutions and wanted to make something that was more affordable and accessible to the public. Through our research, we found that most options on the market (like this smart feeder by PETLIBRO) have a very high price point and fail to even support multiple pets per feeder. This makes them also impractical in settings like pet shelters, where there's a very big need for help feeding and otherwise taking care of animals. We made KibbleKeeper to solve these challenges, making the lives of pet owners easier while hoping to make the lives of pet shelter volunteers easier. We were also inspired by some of the challenge categories and wanted to challenge ourselves with a topic that covers multiple fields.

What it does

KibbleKeeper is an automatic feeder built using Kintone, a raspberry Pi, and multiple peripherals including LEDs, an RFID reader, and a motor. When a pet with an NFC-enabled collar approaches the feeder, it will identify and look up that cat's food schedule with the Kintone backend. If it is time to feed the pet, the feeder will dispense food according to that pets individual needs. This allows the feeder to seamlessly manage the diets of multiple pets, displaying feedback in the form of LEDs so the owner knows which cats have eaten.

How we built it

Our team had to work together on a wide range of tasks for this project, from 3D printing and assembling the feeder to both programming and interacting with the Kintone API and Raspberry Pi peripherals.

Challenges we ran into

As we are all CS or CSE majors at UC Davis, we had to put a lot of work into creating the actual prototype. We also had to familiarize ourselves with Kintone for the first time, and properly manage linked databases on the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how we accomplished our challenges, and that we were able to put together such a comprehensive project in 24 hours. This is especially impressive given that 3 of us have never been to a hackathon before, and the 4th had never done so with other programmers.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the aforementioned tools used for this project, as well as proper class structures and coding practices when working as a group. We also peaked the interest of many mentors and other hardware hackers, who helped us secure components and gave us advise towards our project.

What's next for KibbleKeeper

Some stretch goals we were not able to accomplish in 24 hours including having a buzzer as feedback, handling multiple types of food, and a working UI for the pet owner. If this project inspires the judges and other hackers, we would love to accomplish these goals and make KibbleKeeper a great substitute for feeders already on the market.

Built With

• cardboard
• cheerios
• kintone
• nfc
• python
• raspberry-pi