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 blind, fingerprint 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.)