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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

What a shame. There are a dozen automatic dry kibble feeders you can buy for $50. The dashboard/stats are kinda all trivia. This is okay for short trips or fortunately young/healthy cats.

But what will really push the cat robot meta forward is a feeder capable of refrigerated wet food dispensing.

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Yes! Wet cat food is so unpleasant to deal with, despite being arguably much healthier than kibble. IIRC, since cats prefer to get their fluids from food rather than drinking water from a bowl, wet food goes a long way in preventing dehydration and associated kidney issues.

I guess the reason we've never seen a wet food dispenser is that the only thing worse than cleaning gross wet food residue from a bowl is cleaning it from an overengineered electric dispenser.

I think a wet food dispenser would be fantastic, but you are right in that there are quite a lot of hurdles to it -- spoilage, the often unpleasant smell of wet cat food, the tendency for it to gum up the works as opposed to the more tractable to automation kibble, which merrily rolls along.

My gut feeling here says that any solution in this area is going to involve some kind of can engineering, maybe as far back in the chain as having specially designed wet food dispenser cans.

Refrigeration, too, would come into play unless you were working on a one-redesigned-can, one-serving paradigm. Perhaps a Peltier cooler with the waste heat going to warm some kind of cat friendly pad, as well as the food once served (given that they are carnivores, I am betting that cats would prefer wet food the approximate temperature of mouse guts).

And do not get me started on the struggles of multiple cats, where one or more cats is on a special diet.

I think wet food dispensing could honestly be very healthy for cats (or dogs) but we just haven't spent much time engineering for it.

They already have cat food pouches. Do you want a Juicero for wet cat food pouches?

TBH, I really don’t think Juicero solved any of the actual hard problems you would have for the automation of the serving of wet cat food.

I think it is a little stronger than preference, my understanding is that cats are supposed to get the majority of their water intake from their food AND that their tongue is not very efficient at drinking water, unlike a dogs which is very efficient.

This [1] video does not state my conclusion, but it does (in less than two minutes) show slow motion footage of dogs and cats drinking. You can see that the dog curls its tongue and visibly gets much more liquid up compared to the cat.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=295bNJiTA20&ab_channel=Slate

Cat mate's rotating feeder works well for this. You dish out 5 portions, pop some ice packs underneath it and it will rotate at the given time to reveal the food. Not perfect but it lasts ok overnight, especially if you put in the next morning's food frozen.

I did start building an arduino powered copy of it using a peltier plate and some fly prevention mechanisms. The prototype worked well but since I'm at home 24/7 these days the project fell off my priority list. Maybe this will inspire me to finish it.

Maybe they need a giant over engineered press that requires internet connectivity to scan and validate each bag of wet cat food. We could make it a subscription and each week customers would get fresh bags of healthy, organic pre-masticated cat food.

It will be like Netflix meets Nesspresso but for cat food!! We could call it juicero, er…“catero”!

But seriously. I’d love a good solution for automatic wet cat food.

https://pawbot.com/ has been in various stages of product development for years now, the last I heard of which was an attempt to reduce scope & cost

I built a wet food pet feeder I called "Catzenpup". Give it a look. I'm not working on it now, but it did work great!

https://www.facebook.com/catzenpup/

Garrett

What a shame?

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