[Scott Cutler] has a younger cat, [Cygnus], that likes to run on a cat wheel and [Scott] had some some necessary questions on [Cygnus]’s utilization of the cat wheel like, how usually it’s used, what route is most popular and how briskly does [Cygnus] go. To reply these questions, [Scott] put some telemetry sensors onto the cat wheel and analyzed the outcomes.

An ESP8266 microcontroller and two 3144E corridor impact modules had been used to sense eight magnets glued onto the outer housing of a “One Quick Cat” cat wheel. [Scott] put in the ESP8266 and corridor impact modules onto the bottom help for the wheels, utilizing 3D printed brackets to safe them.

For the software program aspect, the ESP8266 attaches an interrupt handler at any time when a sensor passes by, recording a window of three earlier measurements for legitimate pattern dedication and, if accepted, makes use of the time between samples to deduce route and pace. The ESP8266 connects to a pre-configured native WiFi community and has a telnet interface to extract saved log data, within the type of JSON information.

[Scott] has some good graphs and different information visualizations on [Cygnus]’s utilization, together with a choice for working at 3 AM, reaching a most pace of 14 mph and a mean of 4 seconds per run. The supply is offered on GitHub and the STL recordsdata can be found embedded in [Scott]’s write-up. We’ve featured cat train trackers earlier than with a big hamster wheel outfitted with a Raspberry Pi and it’s good to see some choices that permit for a retrofit possibility along with an entire DIY answer.