Here’s an automatic minder to keep your furry friends’ water supply topped up while you’re away or indisposed. Two homemade dip probes, connected to a microcontroller, sense the water level in a pet’s dish and automatically activate a pump to refill it from a reservoir when it gets low, or send a tweet when the reservoir runs out.
The system I built is based on an Arduino microcontroller, which reads two sensors and controls the waterworks. The simple dip probes are built from just a transistor connected to some wire. The reservoir can be any size but I chose a 3-gallon jug — it lasts a good while but it’s not too bulky. The pet water bowl is filled by a small aquarium pump that sits at the bottom of the reservoir.
The tweeting capabilities come from an Arduino Ethernet shield (or a WiFi shield if you want to get fancy). If the pet bowl doesn’t fill up after a set time in the code, due to an empty reservoir or a sensor failure, it will automatically shut off and post an error tweet, so you can hurry home and top off your pet’s tank.
A bit of a Rube golberg for something your toilet does with a float and a valve! Not saying bad, just does a water level controller really need an arduino?
I agree! I’m all for arduinoing something up, but since the bowl is always required to be full, why not just cut the top off the water container? The dog certainly looks tall enough!
This seems more fun than useful. There are plenty of self-filling bowls that work simply by water tension. Put that water tank upside down with the tip at the high water level. When the bowl is full no more water will run out of the tank. As the water level drops some more will bubble out.
Sheesh… Or you could have some fun.
This project is very useful, but for watering your plants instead. You can fill up an upper container and then slowly let the water flow.
Great idea!
fun
Build this with your plant. …
Thank a much . . . I can apply this to aquaculture . . . water monitoring and control . . .
It’s for normal dogs. Well, I have a German Shepherd and I think he would swallow the circuit :D But it’s a nice idea :)
Thanks, Eloy ! I will use parts of your project to control a submersible pump in our cistern (basement) to refill a toilet tank (ground floor) with rainwater.
Pet Water Warden MAKE: I was hoping that you can insure that the exposed copper wire in my dogs water will not make it toxic. I do not want to risk his health, He drinks a lot of water. Is there any other solution to solve this?
many hospitals uses copper for bed rail instead of stainless steal bed rail. This is because copper has its antimicrobial properties, so your dog is safe. And I hope this 1 year reply is still useful. :D
Hi I’ve recently started to make my own petwaterwarden with the arduino wi-fi shield but have been recieving an error message when trying to verify the code. The message that comes up is,
error: ‘EthernetClient’ does not name a type
and i’m having trouble fixing it.
How strong of an aquarium pump do you recommend?
Also it looks like you can use this “IoT Relay” for half the price of a powerswitch tail II fyi. Just ordered a few myself. http://smile.amazon.com/Iot-Relay-Enclosed-High-power-Raspberry/dp/B00WV7GMA2
I have a solar water pump i want to run from 550 gallon cistern (#1) uphill to two 2500 gallon tank’s (#2) i want to use ultrasonic sensors in both tanks 1&2 so i can do a low water shutoff @50 gallons on tank 1 with a no pump until full. Then kick on when tank #2 needs refilled. I also want to run gsm shield for alerts. Aany way if you could help meout with this it would be greatly appreciated thank you for your time
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