Hamster Wheel to post tweets and website stats

Hi there Arduino Geeks :slight_smile:

I'm very new to this arduino thing and i just got mine a week ago. inspired from my girl and my HamsterII (yes its the second one) I made a Sensor attached to his wheel to catch speed and distance.
its not perfect and i have to buy lots of sensors to catch more and more from a hamster's life.

i made up a little website with php and some graphs. i also made up a cronjob with some random messages to let the hamster tweet. maybe i'll catch something like eliza's db ...
there is no interaction with the internet yet, but lots of ideas like users can give him some drops or refill food. maybe a lcd with some messages to display .. but time is a rare good :slight_smile:

but i just want to present my idea and his website:

http://hamster.data-pirates.org

the "how-I-made-this-thing" is here: http://hamster.data-pirates.org/?w=howto

greetz illu

We love to see things like this! Please keep that web site updated! Thanks!

You should make it so it'll drop it a treat if it runs long enough, and see if it makes the connection

Well, this raises two obvious questions:

  1. How did you instrument the hamster so you can tell whether it's asleep? Was there surgery involved?

  2. How do you do the hamster-to-English translation for tweeting? I checked Google translate, but there were no rodent languages on the list of options...

I'm not into the whole Twitter thing but I love statistics. This is a fun project, it's the hamster-equivalent of attaching a GPS follower device to your cat :wink:

By the way, you may want to obfuscate the URL for your PHP script, in the code that you posted. Someone might get ideas to abuse it and fill your database with crap...

Hey,

  1. hamster can't tell hes awake and there is no surgery involved. Its like teh wheel is monitored with arduino and a linux cronjob updates the website if wheel is running. i want to do more observation with lots more sensors. sometimes the hamster doesnt love his wheel so he just ran along his apartment. more sensors to come.

  2. hamster to tweets. a cronjob checks his wheel (more sensors to come) status and posts random messages to twitter. have to get more intelligence into scripts to look more like hamster tweets :slight_smile:

  3. the php script has security arguments, so i don't mention some posted arguments :slight_smile:

got some problems with magnet field and reed contact .. so maybe i have to get some new magnets. u see here:
http://hamster.data-pirates.org/gallery/get_thumbs_on_fly.php?imgid=8&nw=640&nh=427
maybe its the turn like here its : | __ (parallel and horizontal) and on my bike its like | | (only parallel)
complicated to tell ..

Maybe you could put some kind of heat sensor underneath its nest to be able to tell if its taking a snooze, although how you would do that while keeping the sensor so it isn't noticed or chewed up I don't know.