comments (10)

  • 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.

    SyzygyRhythm

  • 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...

    aanet

  • 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.

    etrautmann

  • 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.

    dlenski

  • Reminds me of Nobel and Ignobel prize winner Andrei Geim, who authorer a paper with his hamster, H.A.M.S. ter Tisha. As I remember, he added Mr/Ms Tisha to be able to write “we” instead of “I”.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09214...

    brightbeige

  • Also built a bike computer for my daughter using an esp32, reed switch and magnet.

    As we had recently watched Back To The Future, when she reached 8.8 mph it would play a brief snippet of appropriate music!

    hi_hi

  • We are all hamsters on Strava.

    tonyedgecombe

  • I love this. I feel like there’s a business and/or product line here if it doesn’t already exist (hamster habitats with integrated cameras).

    freetime2

  • > my hamster now has Strava Premium

    Somewhere there's a product manager looking at this and adding "multi-species household plan" to the roadmap

    interludead

  • the hamster averaged over 10km/night!! given the size of the animal I would not have imagined anywhere near that.

    zem