Neat! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I put together a similar project for my <i>cat's</i> exercise wheel. Hackaday featured it a while back:
<a href="https://hackaday.com/2023/04/02/spy-on-your-cat-to-make-sure-it-gets-its-paws-in/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2023/04/02/spy-on-your-cat-to-make-sure...</a><p>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.<p>Since the article I also built and hooked up a treat dispenser for extra motivation.
> Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.<p>Cats are crepuscular animals. They are "programed" do start at 5 AM, hunt, and go back to sleep until afternoon. Living in homes tweaked them a little, but the 5 AM thing is still strong in a lot of them (mine included).<p><a href="https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/cat-keeping-you-awake-how-manage-night-activity" rel="nofollow">https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/cat-keeping-you...</a>
> Sorry, you have been blocked<p>> You are unable to access animalhumanesociety.org<p>Is this because I laughed when our family dog fell down the stairs when I was six years old?
> crepuscular<p>So not specifically at 5AM, but around twilight. In my area, and for my cats, that changes a lot between summer and winter.<p>Same for my chickens, which is why "automatic chicken doors" are difficult/impossible around here: It'd need to calculate sunset and sundown, and then also consider clouds and trees: in winter the sun sets around 16:30, but the low angle makes sunlight more blocked by clouds, particles and trees and such. My chickens often decide its bedtime before 16:00 already.
The automation features in Apple Home can be set to do things at sunrise or sunset. These track down to the minute the sunrise/sunset times from the weather app data for your location.<p>Your best bet, if you really want an automatic chicken door, is to get a dumb one that just opens when powered on and closes (via springs) when powered off, then plug it into a smart outlet automated to turn on at sunrise and off at sunset.
Sounds like something that could be solved by an ambient light sensor.
Are you crazy? Just get an LLM into the decision loop and you can obviate the need to iterate and test with a lazy human brain and instead waste a fabulous amount of energy, all while setting your project up to get some fat VC …
Light dependent resistor, opamp and relay. No digital components required.
When I did it, I closed the door at nautical twilight. The key is that you need to close the door after the chickens roost but before the nocturnal predators come out.
Automated chicken door isn't too difficult; remember the goal is to <i>allow</i> them to come in or out, not to <i>make</i> them do so or wake them up, though they do get conditioned to the door opening.<p>I made mine to open at actual sunrise (except in the summer; I keep them in until 7am because the coop is cooler, and if let out they can get loud before my neighbors wake up) and close it at actual sunset (not civil twilight, which most people think of when you say "sunset"). Generally the door is open well after the birds are in bed, which is fine.<p>Aside from some dumb birds when they were younger, I've never had one locked out (and those dumb ones were trying to nest in silly places, and weren't going you come in no matter when I closed the door).
When I had cats, I couldn't leave the bedroom door wide open, because that would give them space to come running into the room and jump onto the bed (sometimes on my face) at early hours.
The site runs like a dog.
> Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.<p>It gives him time to run, shower, and drive to work
Have you seen evidence he understands that running causes treats to be dispensed and is running more as a result?
In the Vietnamese zodiac, the time from 5 AM to 7 AM is the Cat hour (it's rabbit in Chinese)
As a former rabbit owner I can attest that around 5 am was when the theater would open, and the first thing on was always this improvised bit called “abused animal trapped forever in a cage”. Lots of special effects too, there was gnawing and rattling and stomping. When I did open the cage door, she would jump out, take a look around and happily go back to napping right there in front of the cage.
To complement the treat rewards, can you get the cat wheel to power a small pump to provide a water fountain for the cat?<p>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).<p>Harvested energy could also power a fan for the wheel and/or a heat pad in your cat's bed.<p>With these improvements, those short jogs will inevitably become marathon runs.
> Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.<p>Poo time?
Which cat wheel is that?
I love that two people independently arrived at "my pet uses a wheel, therefore I need telemetry"
Mollie the Hamster, on Strava: <a href="https://strava.app.link/FMubyPjMa5b" rel="nofollow">https://strava.app.link/FMubyPjMa5b</a><p>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.<p>More here: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_built_a_speeddistance_tracker_for_my_hamster/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...</a>
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”.<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921452600007535" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09214...</a>
Also built a bike computer for my daughter using an esp32, reed switch and magnet.<p>As we had recently watched Back To The Future, when she reached 8.8 mph it would play a brief snippet of appropriate music!
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.
I knew mice were active at night, but I wouldn't have guessed 10k+ was routine
10k steps is a lot for me too.
10k for a hamster will be way more than 10k steps too!
To be fair, root comment only says "mice will run 10k a day" but it isn't 100% clear what that 10K actually refers to, could be steps, could be meters.
In the running context, a 10K means 10 kilometres.
My physics teacher always assumed it was potatoes when the SI-unit was missing
It's 10km, which is a lot more than 10k steps.
Not by much. A mile is 1000 paces, or 2000 steps [0]. 10000 steps is 5 miles, 10km is 6.2 miles.<p>Walking on flat, paved surfaces, I do about 1850 steps per mile of distance[1]. I have a pretty long inseam, so I'm not surprised that I'd be under 1000 paces. Given that roads weren't paved with concrete or asphalt until relatively recently, I'm not surprised that the Roman mile is a little shorter than our current one[2].<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Name" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Name</a><p>[1] Garmin watch<p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman</a>
This is amazing and I love it.<p>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.<p>He might be able to use <a href="https://github.com/dlenski/stravacli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dlenski/stravacli</a> (written by me) or the library it's based on (<a href="https://github.com/stravalib/stravalib" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/stravalib/stravalib</a>) to avoid this requirement and save a few bucks.
We are all hamsters on Strava.
I love this. I feel like there’s a business and/or product line here if it doesn’t already exist (hamster habitats with integrated cameras).
It does! Sort of.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Would a hamster run this much naturally? Or is the running because of the boredom of captivity? TikTok for hamsters?
I’m not surprised. If my hamster isn’t sleeping, he’s running on his wheel. I’m starting to think he’s having an existential crisis...
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).
A quick search suggests one hamster can produce around 0.5 Wh/day, so 100 hamsters should easily power your phone laptop with a constant 50W!
An infinite number of hamsters running in an infinite number of hamster wheels could power a datacenter for one day.
An infinite number of data centers even!
Make the data center run ML/AI experiments for how to effectively run a "energy generation hamster farm" and you have a completely grid-and-internet independent energy solution that optimizes itself via hamsters over time.
But make sure the ML/AI knows how to predict the quantity of bulk grain supply that will be needed to feed the hamsters, and supply long term delivery contracts.
Isn’t this uncomfortably close to the premise of the Matrix?
As long as we don't drug the hamsters and jam them into some sort of fake digital world, we should be fine? Put OpenAI's security researchers on it, heard they're good at containing experiments.
Reminds me of the universal paperclip thing. AI harvesting matter for more hamsters.
No, they would collapse into a singularity with an infinite event horizon that eats up the universe at the speed of light
Unless you're using miniature giant space hamsters
So, an infinite speed, you say? ( ͝סּ ͜ʖ͡סּ)
Dupe of link to original post on reddit: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216926">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216926</a>
“eat-sleep-run-repeat" -- relatable.
Gonna want this in steps.
thats roughly the equivalent of a marathon (or a bit under) a day for a human
> my hamster now has Strava Premium<p>Somewhere there's a product manager looking at this and adding "multi-species household plan" to the roadmap
Depends on the situation imo
Dude named his hamster Mollie, but refers to it by “his” and “he.”<p>Must be Dutch humor.
> Over one seven-day stretch, he started within the same 10-minute window on five nights, between 9:54 and 10:04 p.m.<p>I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.<p>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
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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.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=strava+leak+military+sites" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=strava+le...</a>