Announcing the Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

A dog may be man’s best friend, but many of us live with cats, fish, iguanas, or even wilder animals. And naturally, we like to share our hacks with our …read more

Apr 15, 2025 - 18:28

Announcing the Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

A dog may be man’s best friend, but many of us live with cats, fish, iguanas, or even wilder animals. And naturally, we like to share our hacks with our pets. Whether it’s a robot ball-thrower, a hamster wheel that’s integrated into your smart home system, or even just an automatic feeder for when you’re not home, we want to see what kind of projects that your animal friends have inspired you to pull off.

The three top choices will take home $150 gift certificates from DigiKey, the contest’s sponsor, so that you can make even more pet-centric projects. You have until May 27th to get your project up on Hackaday.io, and get it entered into Pet Hacks.

Honorable Mention Categories

Of course, we have a couple thoughts about fun directions to take this contest, and we’ll be featuring entries along the way. Just to whet your whistle, here are our four honorable mention categories.

Pet Safety: Nothing is better than a hack that helps your pet stay out of trouble. If your hack contributes to pet safety, we want to see it.
Playful Pets: Some hacks are just for fun, and that goes for our pet hacks too. If it’s about amusing either your animal friend or even yourself, it’s a playful pet hack.
Cyborg Pets: Sometimes the hacks aren’t for your pet, but on your pet. Custom pet prosthetics or simply ultra-blinky LED accouterments belong here.
Home Alone: This category is for systems that aim to make your pet more autonomous. That’s not limited to vacation feeders – anything that helps your pet get along in this world designed for humans is fair game.

Inspiration

We’ve seen an amazing number of pet hacks here at Hackaday, from simple to wildly overkill. And we love them all! Here are a few of our favorite pet hacks past, but feel free to chime in the comments if you have one that didn’t make our short list.

Let’s start off with a fishy hack. Simple aquariums don’t require all that much attention or automation, so they’re a great place to start small with maybe a light controller or something that turns off your wave machine every once in a while. But when you get to the point of multiple setups, you might also want to spend a little more time on the automation. Or at least that’s how we imagine that [Blue Blade Fish] got to the point of a system with multiple light setups, temperature control, water level sensing, and more. It’s a 15-video series, so buckle in.

OK, now let’s talk cats. Cats owners know they can occasionally bring in dead mice, for which a computer-vision augmented automatic door is the obvious solution. Or maybe your cats spend all their time in the great outdoors? Then you’ll need a weather-proof automatic feeder for the long haul. Indoor cats, each with a special diet? Let the Cat-o-Matic 3000 keep track of who has been fed. But for the truly pampered feline, we leave for your consideration the cat elevator and the sun-tracking chair.

Dogs are more your style? We’ve seen a number of automatic ball launchers for when you just get tired of playing fetch. But what tugged hardest at our heartstrings was [Bud]’s audible go-fetch toy that he made for his dog [Lucy] when she lost her vision, but not her desire to keep playing. How much tech is too much tech? A dog-borne WiFi hotspot, or a drone set up to automatically detect and remove the dreaded brown heaps?

Finally, we’d like to draw your attention to some truly miscellaneous pet hacks. [Mr. Goxx] is a hamster who trades crypto, [Mr. Fluffbutt] runs in a VR world simulation hamster wheel, and [Harold] posts his workouts over MQTT – it’s the Internet of Hamsters after all. Have birds? Check out this massive Chicken McMansion or this great vending machine that trains crows to clean up cigarette butts in exchange for peanuts.

We had a lot of fun looking through Hackaday’s back-catalog of pet hacks, but we’re still missing yours! If you’ve got something you’d like us all to see, head on over to Hackaday.io and enter it in the contest. Fame, fortune, and a DigiKey gift certificate await!