Tweeting Hamster Cage
What do hamsters do when we're asleep or out of the house? Are they throwing wild parties or practising French? Or maybe just doing some cardio?
We wanted to find out for ourselves what our hamster, Martin, was getting up to behind closed doors and so we built him a tweeting hamster cage. Now all of Martin's friends could keep up with his exercise routine on Twitter and we got to see how far he ran every night!
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino based system detected revolutions of the hamster wheel and calculated Martin's speed and distance run, before snapping a photo of him and posting it all to Twitter.
It turns out that hamsters mostly run at night and we ended up with a twitter account full of thousands of black images. One Infrared camera upgrade later and we were finally getting somewhere.
You can check it out for yourself here: @IsMartinRunning
Sadly, Martin Hamsterman is no longer with us, but his legacy lives on as a fun IOT project and an enormous stream of near-identical photos.
