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By DaveMen
#199677
Hi, I'm new to this site and have read through a lot of posts and watched videos on this subject, however, I have a project that appears to be more complex.

I have a cat that I feed outdoors when I'm away. Last summer the birds were eating all the food and I thought about designing a pressure plate that would allow access to a bowl of food when the weight of the cat was on the pressure plate. Now, I have another variable, a raccoon. So my project has gotten more complicated. Now I'd like to have a sensor that can read the weight of the cat, add a +/- variable, and then control a relay or motor that would allow access to the food.

The crazy thing is, I would buy one of these if it were available, however, I've searched online and cannot find anything even remotely close to this application. In my younger days I was a software engineer (COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C+, etc.) but I have been retired now for quite some time and have limited knowledge of the cool gadgets, chips and sensors that are part of our everyday existence today.

If anyone could point me in the right direction with regard to a few components that I would need, I'd take it from there, as this old dog would like to learn a few more tricks.

Thanks!

Dave
By paulvha
#199683
I assume you want to keep it simple as possible.. but you can try to use an RFID tag. Google on "RFID cat dispenser" and you will see there are complete solutions to DIY solutions.

regards,
Paul