PetSafe Healthy Pet Simply Feed conveyor belt trimming jig

thingiverse

The smallest amount of food that can be dispensed with the PetSafe Healthy Pet Simply Feed automatic feeder is 1/8 cup which is too much for our purposes. I decided that shortening the "paddles" of the conveyor belt would be the easiest way to adjust the amount of food dispensed. With the belt removed from the conveyor assembly, this jig is placed around each paddle and a knife/blade is used to cut off the top (exposed) part of the paddle to shorten it. The paddles are originally 18mm tall and this jig starts at 15mm tall. Using z-axis scaling, I incrementally reduced the height of the paddles, first to 15mm, then 12mm, then 10mm, and ending with 8mm tall paddles. I performed the following steps at each paddle height to calculate the amount of food dispensed: * Trim each paddle on the conveyor belt * Reassemble the conveyor, making sure to align a paddle with the alignment arrows located on the side of the conveyor near the top. This ensures the cavity fully dispenses when the conveyor stops * Put the conveyor back in the feeder, making sure a paddle is still aligned with the arrows. Ensure red lever is latched * Put the hopper back on top. Make sure the agitator lever is placed inside the hole of the hopper) * Fill hopper part way with food * Using navigation buttons on feeder, do "prepare conveyor with food" (enter + left) * After conveyor has been prepared with food, empty any dispensed food back into hopper * With food bowl empty, do "prepare conveyor with food" again * When that is completed, weight the dispensed food and divide by 8 (since a "prepare" cycle empties 8 sections of food). I would place the filled food bowl on my kitchen scale, zero the scale, dump the food back into the hopper, then place the empty food bowl back on the scale which would show the food weight. * Repeat the last two steps 4-6 times and average the results to get the average food dispensed in each section. <pre> Paddle height Food dispensed 18 mm (original) 14.5 grams 15 mm 12.0 grams 12 mm 9.3 grams 10 mm 6.6 grams 8 mm 4.2 grams (29% of original amount)</pre> I chose the 8mm paddle height which resulted in a little less than one-third of the original food dispensed. I strongly suggest slowly reducing the paddle height and measuring the amount of food dispensed at each height. I think the varying sizes and shapes of kibble will result in different amounts dispensed than I calculated with my cat's food. After choosing the 8mm paddle height I had to reconfigure the meal sizes with the navigation buttons. Since one section now dispenses about one-third of original, I would need to increase each meal size from 1/8 cup to 3/8 cup to maintain the same amount of food dispensed. Since our cat is a couple pounds overweight I only increased each meal size to 1/4 cup. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures before I filled the whole hopper with food. I'll try to take some next time it's convenient.