Track Your Kitty's Nighttime Activity with a Raspberry Pi Exercise Wheel

Shawn Nunley has two very active Bengal cats, so he purchased a large hamster-style wheel for them to run on and get their energy out. For better or worse, he can now hear them sprinting on it nearly all night long, making him wonder just how far, how fast, and for what length of time they’re exercising.

To find out, Nunley implemented a Raspberry Pi Zero W speedometer / odometer, using a series six of door alarm magnets around the wheel's circumference. As the wheel turns, the sensors pass a reed switch linked into the Pi, recording a linear travel of 2.095 feet for each detection.

Nunley discovered that the cats run an impressive four to six miles per night, and reach speeds of up to 14 MPH. Future potential improvements include adding RFID tracking to see which cat is working the hardest, and linking it up to a Google Cloud platform so that anyone can keep track of their stats. Given how hard they work, it would be interesting to see if it could actually generate energy for the household, but that would certainly mean a bit more work on the hardware side.

This was the first time Nunley — a former programmer years ago — had attempted to use a Raspberry Pi or Python. Impressively, he was able to pull the hack off in only a week!

[h/t: Raspberry Pi Blog]