Which board to purchase for pet feeder?

Projects General Guidance
1

I have an old "Feed and Go" pet feeder, and I want to rebuild it with Arduino, now that the company is defunct.

Basically, it connects to a 3.3v motor that turns a little tray full of cat food. Its just a "motor-on" for 5 seconds, then "motor-off" on some kind of schedule.

The old board had a bunch of features, like a speaker, lights, sounds, a video camera, but I don't want to over-complicate my build.

Basically I want, a board that connects to wi-fi. And some way to turn the motor on and off. A nice plus would be to enable the camera so that I can see my cats eating.

I was thinking that I would build a simple web service with a "Advance" button, to advance the tray one feeding. Then I can login to my network via the router and visit a tiny website with the button.

Any other ideas on how to best to approach this?

It will be my first project with Arduino, but I've been an embedded systems programmer for about a decade now (software side, not hardware, unfortunately)

Thanks for the advice!

2

The "Arduino" compatible ESP32-PICO-D4 is a SoC IC with wifi built in, and 4 megabytes of flash. Also it is very popular with the Arduino community so it has a lot of support. It is 3.3 volt as well.

3

Do you recommend this: ESP32-Pico-Kit Development board V4 | Elektor

4

The ESP8266 is another microcontroller with built-in WiFi support. It's a bit cheaper than the ESP32 and has better community support due to it having been available longer. The ESP32 is more capable than the ESP8266. Controlling a motor can easily be done with either. I don't know what would be involved with the camera aspect of the project.

Another option is the MKR WiFi 1010. This is an official Arduino board that actually uses an ESP32, but only for the WiFi and BLE capabilities. The primary microcontroller is the same as the Arduino Zero and other SAMD-based boards. The MKR WiFi 1010 is pretty new but the support for the SAMD architecture is pretty mature since Arduino has been selling those boards for quite a few years now.

I would probably pick the ESP8266 if it was my project, since I have the most experience with that board, but I think you'll be fine with any of those options.

5

I'm doing the same project on the same cat feeder w/ a raspberry pi haha. Just curious what progress you've made