9 comments

  • SyzygyRhythm 2 hours ago
    Neat! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I put together a similar project for my cat's exercise wheel. Hackaday featured it a while back: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/02/spy-on-your-cat-to-make-sure...

    His exercise routine is somewhat variable but he usually goes for a short jog a few dozen times a day. Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.

    Since the article I also built and hooked up a treat dispenser for extra motivation.

    • otherme123 3 minutes ago
      > Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.

      Cats are crepuscular animals. They are "programed" do start at 5 AM, hunt, and go back to sleep until afternoon. Living in homes tweaked them a little, but the 5 AM thing is still strong in a lot of them (mine included).

      https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/cat-keeping-you...

    • cure_42 1 hour ago
      Have you seen evidence he understands that running causes treats to be dispensed and is running more as a result?
    • noisy_boy 1 hour ago
      > Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.

      Poo time?

  • etrautmann 2 hours ago
    If you look at any neuroscience paper, mice will run 10k a day or more on a wheel overnight. I thought the axis labels were wrong when I first saw that type of study. It’s quite common.
  • walrus01 35 minutes ago
    I wonder if one could calculate the watt-hours produced in a day by a theoretical 100 hamsters on generator-attached wheels, and if you could run a laptop and LTE hotspot from that (or similar load).
    • pants2 19 minutes ago
      A quick search suggests one hamster can produce around 0.5 Wh/day, so 100 hamsters should easily power your phone laptop with a constant 50W!
      • sokoloff 17 minutes ago
        That would be an average supply of just over 2 W. (50Wh/day is 50Wh/24h or 50/24 W)
    • mjanx123 25 minutes ago
      An infinite number of hamsters running in an infinite number of hamster wheels could power a datacenter for one day.
      • Tepix 23 minutes ago
        An infinite number of data centers even!
  • aanet 2 days ago
    Mollie the Hamster, on Strava: https://strava.app.link/FMubyPjMa5b

    Project: > The main parts are an ESP32 attached to a hall sensor, which I positioned close to the wheel. Using a magnet attached to the back of the wheel, this tells the ESP32 when a full rotation has completed. It gives a timestamp (and total distance) to each magnet-pass, which is stored on the network. A python script (on my laptop) then retrieves this data in the morning, turns it into a .FIT file, and uploads it to Strava through the Strava API (with a randomly chosen run title, taken from a mostly AI-generated list of options, as I needed >100). In terms of manual additions, I had to add the photo manually, and Mollie had to do the running.

    More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...

  • dlenski 1 hour ago
    This is amazing and I love it.

    I was surprised that the owner said he needed to get a Strava premium account in order to be able to auto-upload the hamster's activities. Not 100% sure why.

    He might be able to use https://github.com/dlenski/stravacli (written by me) or the library it's based on (https://github.com/stravalib/stravalib) to avoid this requirement and save a few bucks.

  • zdw 1 hour ago
    Dupe of link to original post on reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216926
  • walrus01 34 minutes ago
    Now the real interesting part would be if people can find a way for their hamster on strava to leak the locations of not-publicized military activities.

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=strava+le...

    • rafram 2 minutes ago
      I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s not clear to me how this is relevant at all. I assume it’s just the other context you’ve heard of Strava in.
  • tonyedgecombe 1 hour ago
    We are all hamsters on Strava.
  • WhyNotHugo 1 hour ago
    > Over one seven-day stretch, he started within the same 10-minute window on five nights, between 9:54 and 10:04 p.m.

    I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.

    We feed the cat at home at the same time every day, and her internal clock definitely know when it's time less than 30' divergence. She suffers the daylight transitions immensely too because of this.