So, I’ve been thinking about something like this for doing continuous weight measurement of cat food and water bowls.

And then the thought occurred to me that we could build an even larger platform to put under that, so that we could also monitor the weight of the cat itself (or themselves).

For a multi-cat household and variable bowl weights, you would have to combine the weight measurements with video surveillance cameras, so that you could confirm which cat is eating or drinking from which bowl. However, with some OpenCV work plus ML, you might be able to automate a lot of that.

Thoughts?

Anyone else interested in such a project?

Or maybe there are already projects out there in this space that I don’t know about?

My primary and overwhelming thought is "feature creep".

Try first to get a working prototype that measures the amount of water in the bowl.

Then worry about weighing the solid food, multiple bowls, weighing the cat, multiple cats, connecting the CCTV to power and network, automated cat identification, setting up OpenCV, doing a ML, and the User Interface.

Edit: I forgot sales and marketing, a common mistake :)

The link is currently overloaded. It’s been archived here though: https://web.archive.org/web/20190731210156/https://iam.mt/bu...

That's what the first ever webcam was invented for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

I'm currently working on a medical product which uses pressure sensitive ink in paper thin sheets to detect presence and movement through a mattress. I think I need to grab a piece of my scraps and put this together myself to monitor our office coffee.

I'd be interested in getting some of that kind of pressure sensitive ink for a DIY MIDI controller project, or a custom PCB manufactured that uses pressure sensitive ink (I haven't found a PCB maker that does that yet).

Do you have any links or info that could help?

I don't have much that can help. We started with pressure sensitive foam for our first proof of concept since it was much easier to obtain. Soon after we worked with a Chinese manufacturer to source a replacement ink. They silkscreen and cure the ink for us into the sheets we need as a component in the final assembly.

One thing I can caution you on is how finicky the inks are. Ink thickness, curing time and temperature, and abrasions to the ink can have large impacts on the responsiveness of the ink to pressure. We do a lot of software and hardware work to mitigate these inconsistencies.

Sounds a bit too finicky, hmm. From looking at teardowns of, eg, the Ableton Push 2, it looks like a gold-plated pcb with fingers that the conductive sheet sits on.

It’s back up now

Link dead?

Looks like it got HN'd. Here's the cached copy:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bzu7No...

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