Welcome to the wheelinator!

This smart cat wheel was originally hacked together by Kieran Burling, who spent far too much time messing around building it in May/June 2019. The wheel itself is the excellent Cazami wheel, and the original version hardware used reed switches attached by GPIO to a Raspberry Pi Zero 1.1, with a backend written in Python and a frontend website hosted from the same Raspberry Pi with lighttpd.

The original hardware had limitations, and the software was poorly written, so it didn't last very long! After some time, the project was reborn in January 2026, with significant help from Kieran's brother, Ross. Ross devised a new and more accurate means of measuring the wheel rotation, using a rotary encoder. The new hardware uses the same Raspberry Pi Zero 1.1, with an STM32 Nucleo connected by UART, with firmware written by Ross to allow interaction with a connected high resolution Rotary Encoder. A custom-made foam cog interfaces with the cat wheel. The backend is still written in Python, and the frontend is a recreation of the original website, now hosted on a separate Raspberry Pi 4b with Apache at Kieran's home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and living at the new domain wheelinator.uk!

See the gallery on the left for some pictures of the development process, and click a photo to see the larger gallery.