Project:
> The main parts are an ESP32 attached to a hall sensor, which I positioned close to the wheel. Using a magnet attached to the back of the wheel, this tells the ESP32 when a full rotation has completed. It gives a timestamp (and total distance) to each magnet-pass, which is stored on the network. A python script (on my laptop) then retrieves this data in the morning, turns it into a .FIT file, and uploads it to Strava through the Strava API (with a randomly chosen run title, taken from a mostly AI-generated list of options, as I needed >100). In terms of manual additions, I had to add the photo manually, and Mollie had to do the running.
To complement the treat rewards, can you get the cat wheel to power a small pump to provide a water fountain for the cat?
Assuming the treats are dispensed after a variable amount of distance is travelled on the cat wheel (to turn your cat into a 'gambler' of sorts, thereby keeping your cat on the wheel in the hope of a treat), a water fountain with 'fresh' water should enable your cat to avoid dehydration (due to the excessive exercise, chasing treats).
Harvested energy could also power a fan for the wheel and/or a heat pad in your cat's bed.
With these improvements, those short jogs will inevitably become marathon runs.
If you look at any neuroscience paper, mice will run 10k a day or more on a wheel overnight. I thought the axis labels were wrong when I first saw that type of study. It’s quite common.
Also cats - I saw experiments where they gave the “my cat is mostly sleeping and sometimes wandering around the garden” cats gps tracker, and found out they routinely wander 8 km away into the woods each night.
> Over one seven-day stretch, he started within the same 10-minute window on five nights, between 9:54 and 10:04 p.m.
I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.
We feed the cat at home at the same time every day, and her internal clock definitely know when it's time less than 30' divergence. She suffers the daylight transitions immensely too because of this.
Every year when DST transitions out, I say “next time we should move the cats’ dinner time gradually leading up to it”, but never remember. I now have reminders for the 5 days leading up to move it later by 10 minutes a day. I don’t know if it will actually make a difference
I was surprised that the owner said he needed to get a Strava premium account in order to be able to auto-upload the hamster's activities. Not 100% sure why.
I wonder if one could calculate the watt-hours produced in a day by a theoretical 100 hamsters on generator-attached wheels, and if you could run a laptop and LTE hotspot from that (or similar load).
Now the real interesting part would be if people can find a way for their hamster on strava to leak the locations of not-publicized military activities.
The company Niteangel sells a pedometer for their hamster wheels. It doesn’t provide times or speeds, but it does give you the number of revolutions per night.
I have thought it would be interesting to hook something up to be able to get the times and speeds. It never occurred to me that you could use something like Strava to record it.
Reminds me of Nobel and Ignobel prize winner Andrei Geim, who authorer a paper with his hamster, H.A.M.S. ter Tisha. As I remember, he added Mr/Ms Tisha to be able to write “we” instead of “I”.
Various people have tracked their pet's movements, and that's genuinely a really good thing to do to understand whether they're getting enough activity. But to Strava it and create competition among pet owners, very interesting.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadProject: > The main parts are an ESP32 attached to a hall sensor, which I positioned close to the wheel. Using a magnet attached to the back of the wheel, this tells the ESP32 when a full rotation has completed. It gives a timestamp (and total distance) to each magnet-pass, which is stored on the network. A python script (on my laptop) then retrieves this data in the morning, turns it into a .FIT file, and uploads it to Strava through the Strava API (with a randomly chosen run title, taken from a mostly AI-generated list of options, as I needed >100). In terms of manual additions, I had to add the photo manually, and Mollie had to do the running.
More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...
His exercise routine is somewhat variable but he usually goes for a short jog a few dozen times a day. Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.
Since the article I also built and hooked up a treat dispenser for extra motivation.
Assuming the treats are dispensed after a variable amount of distance is travelled on the cat wheel (to turn your cat into a 'gambler' of sorts, thereby keeping your cat on the wheel in the hope of a treat), a water fountain with 'fresh' water should enable your cat to avoid dehydration (due to the excessive exercise, chasing treats).
Harvested energy could also power a fan for the wheel and/or a heat pad in your cat's bed.
With these improvements, those short jogs will inevitably become marathon runs.
I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.
We feed the cat at home at the same time every day, and her internal clock definitely know when it's time less than 30' divergence. She suffers the daylight transitions immensely too because of this.
I was surprised that the owner said he needed to get a Strava premium account in order to be able to auto-upload the hamster's activities. Not 100% sure why.
He might be able to use https://github.com/dlenski/stravacli (written by me) or the library it's based on (https://github.com/stravalib/stravalib) to avoid this requirement and save a few bucks.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=strava+le...
Must be Dutch humor.
Somewhere there's a product manager looking at this and adding "multi-species household plan" to the roadmap
The company Niteangel sells a pedometer for their hamster wheels. It doesn’t provide times or speeds, but it does give you the number of revolutions per night.
I have thought it would be interesting to hook something up to be able to get the times and speeds. It never occurred to me that you could use something like Strava to record it.
As we had recently watched Back To The Future, when she reached 8.8 mph it would play a brief snippet of appropriate music!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09214...