Automated pet feeder made with ESPHome under construction.
The sparrows occasionally come in for a seasonal binge of puppy food, and it makes a mess when the small-mouthed birds dig it up instead of taking a bite out of each one. So, I bought an auto-open feeder from Aliexpress with a proximity sensor, used it for a while, and became dissatisfied with the function (it closed in the middle of eating, startling my dog).
Traditional passive infrared (PIR) sensors have the problem of opening the lid when sparrows come. For the first time, I used an ultrasonic distance sensor as a baseline for opening and closing. But the trouble with the malfunction of the ultrasonic distance sensor(occasionally happened after waking up from deep sleep of ESP32-C3), I chose the infrared thermal sensor(8x8 pixels AMG8833-based sensor).
1st version of the autopetfeeder is activated by an Ultrasonic distance sensor.
Home Assistant screen capture
When the autopetfeeder is open
inside of 1st version autopetfeeder - XIAO ESP32-C3, L298N, PIR, HC-SR04, two 18650 batteries, charging and power supplying module
2nd version of the autopetfeeder is activated by MCU8833(AMG8833) 8x8 thermal sensor.
Home Assistant screen capture
A minimum, maximum, and average of 64 temperature values in the outside environment.
As we can see in the above chart, we cannot depend on only the MCU8833 sensor. Under sunlight, the difference between max and average increases, and abnormal temperature values appear according to the placement.
- More stories can be found at https://imky.tistory.com/86 (in Korean)
- AMG8833-related codes are originated from https://github.com/TheRealWaldo/AMG8833-ESPHOME