Monday, December 26, 2016

Automatic Pet Feeder using Arduino

We've had several posts in the past talking about various issues related to humans needing to travel. Examples: Should you try to fly with your human? Should you take a car trip with your human? Should your human leave you at home and try to find someone to take care of you? For those humans who are only going on a short trip and have strong technical skills, we have another option to share with you involving using an Arduino to feed us.

For those who have never heard of it, Arduino is: "Open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects." People have put them to use on cool projects such as security cameras, "smart canes" for the blindfingerprint scanning garage door openers, and hacking talking teddy bears to make them say what you want. It was only a matter of time before an enterprising guinea pig owner put this technology to work for us!


For more details, see here: "Arduino - Guinea Pig automatic food and water dispenser by Studvio."

Our humans have experimented a little with a similar device called a Raspberry Pi, but making something like this is a bit beyond them for now. If any of our readers actually have made something like this, let us know in the comments section!

(Again, we want to emphasize that this should only be used for very short trips. You wouldn't want to risk your guinea pig going without food for too long if the power goes out or the device malfunctions! In fact, we'd probably recommend that if you're going to rely on something like this, you may also want to set up a webcam to monitor the guinea pig cage for these sorts of emergencies.)

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to All Our Piggie Friends!

Happy holidays, everyone! Thank you for being loyal readers following all our piggie adventures, and sharing your adventures with us in the comments section.



We hope you and your families (both furry and human) enjoy the holiday season and have a fabulous 2017!

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Cavy Savvy 500th Post Celebration!

Guess what, loyal readers? This post is our 500th Cavy Savvy post! That's a whole lot of food reviews, product reviews, questions answered, and other guinea pig information. We like to commemorate milestones like this, but it's a little bittersweet this time since the blog founders Lola (1) and Buffy aren't with us to celebrate this time around. But I'm sure they're still avidly reading our latest posts from the Rainbow Bridge, happy to see that what they built still endures.

Time to celebrate!

Looks like romaine lettuce, apple, and orange pepper!
I claim the orange pepper!
Hey Lola... We did it! 500 posts!
Here's to hundreds more!

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Can guinea pigs eat red carrots?

Long-time readers of this blog may know that carrots come in colors other than just orange, including white and and purple. To get in the Christmas mood, we're reviewing a food that's Christmas-colored: red carrots. This particular variety is known as "nutri-red," and it is known to be very high in lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes and known to have heath benefits for humans. Red carrots are originally from India and China.

Like all carrots, you can feed us the equivalent of one baby carrot per day.

They're not super red. More like a reddish-orange.
But they sure taste like carrots!
Mmm... Carrots!
We have yet to meet a carrot that we didn't love! Red carrots get 5/5 stars!