18. Invention, Intellectual Property and Income
This website contains a "Fab A Cat Feeder" project on the "final project page" that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (or CC-BY-NC-SA).
Therefor :
- You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
- Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes .
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
You are free to build and adapt this cat feeder for your own purpose.
What's next ?
I finally came with the idea of this cat feeder because of my sister's cats who are overweight and so she has to give them a certain amount of food everyday that she has to measure.
As she has 3 cats and each bowl of food is open to every one of them to go, I thought it should be hard to be sure each cat ate the right amount he/she is supposed to.
Also, Summer is finally more or less there in Belgium and with the heat so are the flies (she lives in the countryside so she gets a lot of them in the house).
All these facts made me think that if she needed an automatic cat feeder it would need several things :
- A lid over the bowls that keeps flies and the other cats from going in it
- A system to detect that the correct animal is in front of the right bowl
- A system that let's here know if there's the right amount of food in the bowl and if the cat is right by communicating that the bowl is empty (we know how they can manipulate us slave humans ;) )
So the minimum needed for this project in electronics would be :
- A motor/servo motor to open and close the lid
- A distance sensor and later a RFID system to detect the animal (but also the human slave)
- Some LEDs to show by color how much food is left in the bowl
- A weight/force sensor to measure the amount of food in the bowl
Right now the project just has the servo motor to open/close the lid, the LEDs but which only show colors regarding the fact that the lid is open/close and the distance sensor to detect if someone's approaching the feeder.
There's still a lot to do to achieve the final desired product.
So, despite a willing to commercialize this feeder because I know there are a lot of automatic feeders on the market already, I still haven't really found one with all these features. And as I'm on already the pet market for other products (sewed accessories), I'm thinking maybe this could become something I could add to my products.
That's why I chose this license.
It still is a poor basic prototype at this stage but I'm willing to continue working on it because the Fab Academy showed me the possibilities and made me realize that I'm capable to go further.
Some bonus in this project, if I got to do what I still need to to get my first real idea finished, is design a nice shape in 3D print and also add a camera to watch your cat when you're away. That means working also on a smartphone app which will send you notification about detection of the cat so that you can turn on the camera, but also a notification about the amount of food left.
It's maybe a bit ambitious but I want to challenge myself with this project and continue learning after the Fab Acamdey because I still feel frustrated to not have had enough time to really dig in all the techniques and machines.
Files and resources
Resources