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This project has the source files for the precise treat dispenser for canine cognition experiments.

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unl-cchil/canine_precise_dispenser

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Raspberry Pi controlled precise treat dispenser

This project provides the source for a precise canine treat dispenser designed for numerical discrimination tasks.

Precise Dispenser

Overview

For detailed overview, review the user guide or the Journal of Open Hardware paper. The basic operating principles of the dispenser can be seen in our YouTube demo video or in this embedded video.

By using the embedded Python library in the Raspberry Pi image, which is also included in this repository, the stepper motor can be controlled to position the treat holes over the pellet exhaust, leading to a dispensation. By chaining these events together, a specified quantity of treats can be dispensed. Additionally, the image is configured with a working build of PsychoPy (v3.2.4).

Raspberry Pi Image

The SD card image for the Raspberry Pi has all dependencies installed and only needs to have its access point configured using pi-ap. The image can be found here. Use an SD card flasher to write this image to a bootable media, such as balenaEtcher, Win32DiskImager, or other similar software.

Interfacing Example

from precise_dispenser_driver import PreciseDispenser

dispenser = PreciseDispenser()
try:
	dispenser.dispense_treats(10)
	print(“Successfully dispensed ten treats.”)
except ValueError as e:
	print(e)
dispenser.close()

License

The hardware is available under a CERN-OHL-S-2.0 license, found here.

The software is available under an MIT license, found here.

The documentation is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-SA 4.0), found here.

Project Mentions

Hackaday, UNL Pocket Science

Contact

This project was conducted by the Canine Cognition and Human Interaction Lab. For questions, please contact the developer Walker Arce (warce@unomaha.edu) or the principal investigator Jeffrey R. Stevens (jeffrey.r.stevens@gmail.com).

Citation

Arce, W., and Stevens, J. R. (2022). A precise dispenser design for canine cognition research. Journal of Open Hardware, 6(1), 2. http://doi.org/10.5334/joh.41

Funding

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant (SES-1658837) and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Council Grant-in-Aid to JRS.

Dataset Metadata

The following table is necessary for this dataset to be indexed by search engines such as Google Dataset Search.

property value
name A precise dispenser design for canine cognition research reliability testing dataset
description The dataset from the paper [A precise dispenser design for canine cognition research](http://doi.org/10.5334/joh.41). We tested five treat dispensers 100 times each with 10 tests of increasing dispensing targets from 1 to 10 treats. Each row of the data file gives the expected and actual number of treats dispensed for a single trial.
url
sameAs https://github.com/unl-cchil/canine_precise_dispenser
citation TBA
hw license
property value
name CERN-OHL-S-2.0
url
sw license
property value
name MIT
url
docs license
property value
name CC BY-SA 4.0
url

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This project has the source files for the precise treat dispenser for canine cognition experiments.

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