March 10, 2026
Description
With Alfeedo your cat will be fed the right amount at the right time. Combining style and functionality, it can be operated stand-alone via its OLED display and touch input buttons. A stepper motor takes care of dispensing a controlled amount of food while the controlling ESP32 serves for additional features such as a web interface with settings, timers, feeding logs and smart home integration. A built-in sensor measures the fill level and alerts the user before the feeder runs empty.
Alfeedo comes with a sophisticated web interface, allowing remote operation, monitoring and configuration of the device.
A REST API is available to integrate it with your smart home system. For home assistant users, there's an integration and dashboard card ready made. Once installed, your Alfeedo device will be auto-discovered and set up.
In order to operate precisely and safe, the dispensing mechanism is controlled via a stepper motor and using the StallGuard technology to detect and automatically resolve any jamming. It keeps logs of dispensed meals and snacks, as well as the fill level to inform you before it runs empty. A sophisticated time management in the software makes sure to not miss any feedings. It recovers after power outages and catches up with any missed feedings, properly handles daylight saving times and even operates in fail safe mode when time cannot be retrieved from the internet. This makes it usable even in environments without internet connection.
Alfeedo is provided for your cats (and your) convenience. Reliability of the device depends on your thoroughness in following the build instructions precisely.
It has been tested for months and has proven to be stable and reliable as well as withstanding an overly voracious cat trying to crack it open every night.
That said, omitting the sanding steps while building, may cause it to jam the conveyor easily, depending on the used food pellets. The instructions and build files are provided as is, without warranty of any kind. It is here to ease/speed up your daily feeding routine and may be used to cater for your cats preferred meal/snack times when you're busy otherwise. Needless to say that you should never leave a pet unattended for an extended period of time, neither with nor without the use of Alfeedo.
Alfeedo has been tested with various food pellets up to 10x5 mm in size. Larger pellets may or may not work, depending on the roughness of their surface and the tendency to line up in stacks.
The provided web interface does not support any authentication or encryption. It has been taken care to not allow extracting configured WiFi credentials, so it is fine to use within your personal WiFi but it is not advised to directly expose Alfeedo to the internet through your router/firewall. Please either use home assistant cloud, a VPN, or an SSL enabled authentication proxy such as tinyproxy for that.
Building Alfeedo is easy Print the parts, order the PCB boards (optional - recommended) at your favorite PCB manufacturer via the provided schematics. Just a little bit of soldering the electronics components is required.
Alfeedo's firmware is open source and hosted in this github repostory.
The Homeassistant integration is also hosted on github.
The following settings are in the provided print profiles but if you want to slice and configure it yourself here are some things to consider:
Get the PCB files (Gerber) here:
Head over to your favorite/local/accessible PCB manufacturing service (Aisler, JLCPCB, PCBWay…), submit the two .zip files and order the PCBs.
Also order this list of electronics parts.
If ordering the PCB boards is not an option for you, don't worry, it's not required. Alfeedos PCB dimensions are aligned to standard 4x7 and 3x7 perforated prototyping circuit boards. You'll find details wiring schematics in the assembly guide. You'll still need all the other parts from the above list except the JST-PH2.0 connectors, which won't fit on these boards. Instead you'll have to solder them manually.
An online flasher is provided here. Note that you'll have to flash the ESP32 through its onboard USB port. The USB port on the back of Alfeedo only supports power supply. Once flashed, Alfeedo can be upgraded via its integrated web interface over WiFi. The firmware for Alfeedo is open source and available on github.
if using home assistant, the integration can be found here.
If you have issues with the printing model files, feel free to leave a comment here.
For problems with the firmware it is advised to to open an issue on github.
You are free to build Alfeedo for yourself, friends and family. You may not commercially print and sell Alfeedo without explicit written permission. Leave a message if interested in doing so.
The Alfeedo firmware code is licensed under the GPLv3. Feel free to use it for your own feeder model. I'd also be happy to cooperate in adding support for scales, LEDs or other features. The Alfeedo PCB boards have 2 free GPIO ports (one in the base, one in the lid) reserved for future use which can be used to connect further sensors or actors and the firmware should be modular enough to allow being extended for such features.
Boost MeFeed the feeder, leave a boost!
License:
Standard Digital File License
Micha31
