Hungry Dog - Tecnologia remota para alimentação animal

Abstract

Today, one of the areas with the greatest economic growth on the national scene is the pet market. This happens due to the pet humanization process, which makes people pay more attention to their pets. Therefore, they invest more resources in the health and well-being of the animal. Even if people appreciate their pets, they spend long periods with other occupations, making it difficult to care for the animal's well-being. Thus, an erroneous way found by people to remedy this problem is to provide food once a day, but in excess. Another negative means found is that of leaving too much time between subsequent meals. Therefore, this routine can harm the food, physical and mental health of the animal, putting its quality and life expectancy at risk. A solution for this problematic would be the implementation of an automatic feeder. However, as it is difficult to find such equipment on the market that meets all requirements at a fair price, people end up opting for the conventional way of feeding animals. The resolution of this issue would be the creation of a project capable of providing total comfort to the owners. The prototype of the automatic pet feeder elaborated and described in this work is able to connect to a Wi-Fi network and send data about the last time the animal was fed, return messages so that the user knows if the device was activated properly and also being possible to use it without restrictions until the ration runs out. The user will be able to define how many meals he wants to provide through a website and its autonomy will vary for feeding small, medium or large dogs, ranging from just one day to ten days. The use of the microcontroller NodeMCU V3 Lolin is the gateway to connect the project to the internet, thus allowing remote access and control. It is also possible to program it using the Arduino IDE, connecting it via a micro-usb cable. In addition, the Driver Ponte H L298N was used, which allows controlling the direction of rotation of the motor, as well as its speed and precision. Finally, the stepper motor was used, which is characterized by the management of the position of its axis, allowing an extremely precise control of the speed and the applied torque.