Cat-proofing a cat feeding machine

I recently got a SureFeed RFID feeder. It can read your cat&#x27;s microchip or an RFID collar tag. When an authorized kitty approaches, a flap raises and lets the cat eat. I got it to prevent other family pets from stealing my cat&#x27;s food. It works well for that purpose and seems well designed. The feeder has clear side &quot;walls&quot; and the flap itself acts as a wall on the rear of the feeder, helping prevent food theft during authorized feeding.<p>I&#x27;d like to hack it and add timer functionality. See, my cat is always trying to get breakfast early and is always underfoot from 4 A.M. until I feed him. I tripped over him and broke my ankle last month because of this. I figure, if I can load up breakfast&#x27;s meal before I go to bed, and only &quot;unlock&quot; the feeder after 7 A.M., my cat may eventually learn to stop bugging me at night. The joke will probably be on me though, darn cats.<p>I&#x27;d like to use an ESP8266 for this so I can also have an IoT feeder that reports usage statistics. =P

Wait until you get children. Those bastards have the same brain as yours and tiny tiny hands.<p>Preventing them from opening closets, garbage cans and cabinets is an arms race. You know you will eventually lose, the only thing you can do is slow them down.

The problem, as in most difficult hacking operations, is that the attacker has physical access.<p>I would have put the machine in a base cabinet, run a chute out a small hole cut in the toe mould, and if necessary, put a child lock on the cabinet.

I had a simple auger-fed model for our cat. I realized very quickly she could reach up there and get food meant for the next cycle... and eventually realized I didn&#x27;t care. If she takes the food intended for the next cycle, less comes out next, and if she goes into the next meals portion again, she&#x27;s getting the same amount of food, and some stimulation for free trying to get it out.

The problem-solving abilities of that cat are pretty impressive. I couldn&#x27;t imagine my cat bracing himself against a table and picking up the whole feeder with his teeth, I wish there had been a video of that.<p>The creativity and versatility of even a &quot;simple&quot; biological intelligence is a humbling reminder of how much work we have ahead for AI research.

My ex girlfriend&#x27;s cat was a fat cat and would nip the back of our legs when he was hungry. I spent one night building an Arduino feeder that rationed his food out throughout the day, and by the next morning it had been destroyed. He also loved to &quot;experiment with gravity&quot; by pushing things off tables and windowsills, for which he also destroyed most of the engineering work I did to deter him. So I know firsthand what an impressive feat it is to cat-proof <i>anything</i>.

One of our greedy cats used to attempt to get into the Andrew James automatic feeders, even though he never could. He&#x27;d do this noisily at 4 in the morning. We&#x27;ve had to go back to manual feeding, and for this our cats have tried pulling the carpet up, chewing off our hair, dragging our hair, batting us in the face, meowing incessantly from a distance, chewing the MP3 player in the room, chewing the window handles, chewing the lamp, rocking the wireless phone backwards and forwards so that it beeps, chewing the phone charger, digging our slippers into oblivion, digging through my wife&#x27;s handbag, clawing the bannisters, jumping onto the banisters whilst shouting in a catlike manner and precariously wobbling around (I fear he&#x27;ll fall down onto the ground floor and damage himself badly, he&#x27;ll fall on the stairs), pulling bifold doors open (he can grab them with his paw underneath), biting our hands. British Shorthairs are STRONG. Anything to get us up!<p>Our golden wonder cat Sponge has never done anything to get us up. He patiently waits. He&#x27;s lovely.

When people talk about how their pets are acting funny, I always wonder whether they realize that it&#x27;s because of the boring habitat their pets have been put in. Asking them about it is delicate because it implies that their pet might be unhappy about its situation.

This is the best up-armoured cat feeder I&#x27;ve seen this week. Kudos to Quinn for never giving up.<p>I&#x27;m terrified to think what the next step will be once Sprocket chooses to escalate.

I went through a similar sort of battle with my cat. I lucked out on an ugly, but thus-far impenetrable solution.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;wQNebLM" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;wQNebLM</a><p>I bought that feeder at the last minute before we left town for a weekend, which was just long enough that we needed the cat to be fed, but just short enough that it didn&#x27;t make sense to bug friends or a service. Ran to the store and grabbed the only one they had, which is to say, no real research was involved beyond necessity.<p>It&#x27;s an OK feeder. I don&#x27;t love it. But I _really_ love having an automated feeder. It literally improved our lives. There were issues, which I&#x27;ll explain, but for the $80 I spent on it, I couldn&#x27;t just chuck the thing. I had to at least try to work it out.<p>First problem was that the bowl is detachable. So almost immediately, the cat would knock the bowl off trying to get under the feeder for more food. And when feeding time came, it just emptied onto the floor. Tape fixed that.<p>And then he realized that if he lifted the feeder with his face, it would drop a few pebbles of food into the bowl. And so he started knocking the thing around when he got hungry. This wasn&#x27;t a huge deal at first. He&#x27;d do it a couple times and then go back to sleep.<p>And then we went away for another weekend. When we got home, the feeder was on the other side of the apartment. &quot;Cute&quot;, we thought, put the feeder back and went about our day.<p>The next night, at about 2am, the cat spent a full hour trying to get in. He was lifting the feeder about once per minute, sometimes more. So just a constant banging for a full hour until I got up to do something about it. I tried to leave it be as I got some work done, but it got worse and louder. Just as I arrived on the scene, he&#x27;d popped the top off - though he hadn&#x27;t realized he could get the food from the top.<p>So, at a loss for time as I needed to get back to work, I did what&#x27;s shown in the photo. Taped the lid under a tall chair. I figured that would buy me some time to get back to work and I could try to work on a better solution in a day or so. It&#x27;s been that way for about 4 months now.<p>The magic of it is that the cat can&#x27;t get enough leverage on the feeder to knock it around and get food out. And if he lifts the chair (with his face), the tape has enough give that the chair moves, but the feeder remains unmolested. It looks ridiculous, but it solved the problem, so we&#x27;re leaving it as is. That chair is now part of the cat feeder.

Jeff Atwood also wrote an interesting article about cat feeding machines but with a slightly different topic:<p>&quot;This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;this-is-all-your-app-is-a-coll...</a>

do not feed cats from a machine. Even if you are super busy, give her food in the morning and after you get home from work, that&#x27;s more than enough. Perhaps at the same time as your breakfast and your dinner. Despite the common perception of cats as &#x27;loners&#x27; , they still want to be part of your &#x27;gang&#x27; not a lonely creature feeding from a machine.<p>Ideally you would want to play with the cat before feeding her so she associates food with hunting not as a cure to boredom. Even if you are too busy to do that, the act of giving your cat food can be a bonding experience for a cat that&#x27;s stuck indoors 24&#x2F;7. Many cat health issues can be diagnosed by keeping an eye of food habit since cats famously hide their weakness (to not signal weakness to predators, i would imagine). Free feeding cats would hide their illness till its too late to do anything about it.<p>Same with litter even if you use &#x27;litter robot&#x27; keep an eye on the poop when you change the litter, common kidney diseases can be instantly identified by glancing at poop.

This is amazing, but I have to say, I really don&#x27;t think it will work for my cat. He would learn to use an acetylene torch if there was food as a reward.

Had similar problems with our cat who was able to retrieve food from every automatic feeder we tried, apart from the perfect pet feeder [1] which was the only model that defeated him.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfectpetfeeder.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfectpetfeeder.com&#x2F;</a>

That is amazing. I&#x27;m so glad I can just free feed my cat with out her getting obese, or even fat.

&quot;You might say I’ve won this battle. However I just spent 20 hours armor-plating a cat feeder. I think we know who’s really in control here, don’t we?&quot;

Someone in the other thread suggested the problem is she can smell the rest of the food. I&#x27;d bet that&#x27;s a huge contributor.

All of the attack vectors of that specific cat feeder have been addressed by mine.<p>I applaud the ingenuity, but fear she spent far more time and money &quot;fixing&quot; this one instead of doing a little amazon shopping.<p>I also hope that she unbolts that bowl to clean it every week.

Somewhat relevant and got some attention on HN recently:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;cats_actually_kill" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;cats_actually_kill</a>

This is an excellent example of why AI safety can never work by listing bad outcomes.<p>And the cat is not even superintelligent.

My plan if I were to ever build a robot I&#x27;d use a cat&#x27;s brain as the AI template for the brain.<p>Move something 1mm the cat comes into the room and seems to be thinking &quot;Hey who messed up the place? What&#x27;s going on?&quot;<p>Cats are little pattern recognition machines.

Compare to cows, who after being trained by real cattle guards, won&#x27;t step on painted lines that simulate them.

This should give a moment&#x27;s pause to anyone who thinks we could keep a superhuman AI in a box.

Wonder what would happen if you just gave the cat unlimited access to a large bowl of unguarded food all day every day. Would the cat eventually self-regulate the amount it ate? Or would you just end up with a really fat cat? Or both to some degree?

I&#x27;m not much of a hardware hacker but it&#x27;d be interesting to work on a wet food cat feeding machine.

He&#x2F;she needs the Feed and Go.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feedandgo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feedandgo.com&#x2F;</a><p>It is expensive but impregnable. My cat can smell the food in there, so for the first couple of days he relentlessly attacked it. But he can&#x27;t get in so he has given up.<p>He can figure his way into many things, including most trash cans, so we put kitchen trash into a 5-gallon bucket with a screw top lid.<p>Most pet feeders are cheap, poorly thought out, and easily penetrated by cats.

Man did I get lucky with my cat when reading all these comments here... She always has a bowl of food available, only touches it when she&#x27;s hungry and rarely finishes it completely. I fill it up once or twice a day, and she mostly ignores me when I do. The most she does is come and smell the freshly poured food from time to time, but with little interest in actually touching it at that point - even when her bowl had been completely empty. And when she eats, she&#x27;s always very calm about it, like there&#x27;s no rush.<p>And it doesn&#x27;t stop there. She knows how to use the litter-box, but she prefers to go outside - which means I rarely have to clean it - like once every month at most, only when she has been left inside for too long. I should find something to notify me when she actually used it.<p>She probably spends 70% indoor, 30% outdoor, which is when she terrorizes the other, more tame (but much larger) cats of the neighborhood or goes hunting. I should also find something that addresses here hunting nature, because the rate at which birds and mice are dropped at my back-door is quite alarming. A collar with a bell didn&#x27;t seem to affect her hunting success-rate at all, and only gave her an allergic reaction to the collar - so we removed it.

<i>Mostly foiled by this copper, she then went back again to the lift-and-drop strategy. This time she figured out she could rotate my hold-down clamp out of the way, and again the machine was free to lift.</i><p>Is this an indication of cat cleverness, or tech person&#x27;s engineering ineffectiveness?<p>If I ever design a cat feeder, then I&#x27;ll design one with discrete feeding compartments, and holes tapped in a bottom plate for hold-down screws.

I highly recommend the PetNet SmartFeeder. I&#x27;ve had two for both of my cats for the past year, and they work great. It allows you to setup automated timed feeds for several meals a day, then pings your phone each time a feed goes off (for peace of mind).<p>The product design is about as nice looking as you can make a feeder, and the mobile app&#x27;s UI has improved a lot over the past few months to a good state.

After about the second failure I would have gotten one of those auto feeders that let out as much as they want and some weight control cat food.

How common is it to need to restrict a cats eating? I always just keep dry food constantly available for my cat. She is around 14 years old and is a dainty little thing. I&#x27;ve never had any issue with her overeating or anything. When I&#x27;m away from home for a couple days, I&#x27;ll just fill a really large bowl and leave it for her and there&#x27;s usually a bunch left when I get back. Is this terribly unusual?

&gt; You need opposable thumbs to remove a bolt (even a finger-tight one), so I’m confident this is secure.<p>&gt; You might say I’ve won this battle. However I just spent 20 hours armor-plating a cat feeder. I think we know who’s really in control here, don’t we?<p>I find this very disturbing... That said, the final result looks very well-made. Nice hacking!

Simpler solution? Place cat feeder on top of refrigerator, long tube to direct falling food down to bowl on floor.

Wow I had the same problem with the exact same feeder. This solution is awesome! I just ended up tying the unit to a table and called it a day. I also adjusted the food output, knowing he was going to get extra food from reaching up inside the feeder.

I had 10+ cats at some moment and feeding them was a challenge.<p>I used to form lines with cat food. Looked a bit like farming.<p>Birds then would try to eat the remains, only to become additional cat food.<p>I&#x27;ve heard some vegans force their cats to become vegans as well. I think it is not healthy.

Obviously all the software development managers are going to gravitate to this thread..

After reading, I can&#x27;t help but think that the problem is that the cat knows there is food inside.. is there a leak where the scent gets out?<p>I would try sealant around all the seams And revert back to so lesser security measures to test it.

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&quot;It’s almost as though there’s a psychological effect of the imposing structure that is keeping her from even trying.&quot;<p>What like being able to see how much cat food is still in the machine?

Has he tried a increase in the cat&#x27;s food intake? Seems low cost, low risk, and if it does not work you can resume armor plating the robot.

Wonderful article, I howled aloud when I passed this &quot;It was the best and worst day for Sprocket.&quot;.

anyone with more money than time and metal working skills might consider just getting a super feeder: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.super-feeder.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.super-feeder.com</a> (nothing but a satisfied customer, here.)

I&#x27;m impressed by both of the adversaries in this story.

I love it that there&#x27;s people in the world who are so nerdy as to document such a thing.

Could one draft a NN-Algorithm from this? One NN as a antagonistic force, trying to overcome a machines original purpose, one as a deterring force, that alters the CAD-model?

...

This seems like a classic case of over-engineering the wrong problem.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t that the cat is getting into the machine, the problem is that the human is neglecting to feed the cat.<p>Solve the right problem.