
Building a Coffee Pot Monitor Using Raspberry Pi - appikonda
https://iam.mt/building-a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/
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bradknowles
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?

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AndrewOMartin
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 :)

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egwynn
The link is currently overloaded. It’s been archived here though:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190731210156/https://iam.mt/bu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190731210156/https://iam.mt/building-
a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/)

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

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LCoder
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.

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brokenmachine
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?

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LCoder
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.

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brokenmachine
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.

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appikonda
It’s back up now

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bbischof
Link dead?

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wayne1117
Looks like it got HN'd. Here's the cached copy:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bzu7No...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bzu7NoK7Du8J:https://iam.mt/building-
a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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bbischof
ty

