Neat! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I put together a similar project for my cat's exercise wheel. Hackaday featured it a while back: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/02/spy-on-your-cat-to-make-sure...

His exercise routine is somewhat variable but he usually goes for a short jog a few dozen times a day. Most often at 5 am, for whatever reason.

Since the article I also built and hooked up a treat dispenser for extra motivation.

Mollie the Hamster, on Strava: https://strava.app.link/FMubyPjMa5b

Project: > The main parts are an ESP32 attached to a hall sensor, which I positioned close to the wheel. Using a magnet attached to the back of the wheel, this tells the ESP32 when a full rotation has completed. It gives a timestamp (and total distance) to each magnet-pass, which is stored on the network. A python script (on my laptop) then retrieves this data in the morning, turns it into a .FIT file, and uploads it to Strava through the Strava API (with a randomly chosen run title, taken from a mostly AI-generated list of options, as I needed >100). In terms of manual additions, I had to add the photo manually, and Mollie had to do the running.

More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...

Also built a bike computer for my daughter using an esp32, reed switch and magnet.

As we had recently watched Back To The Future, when she reached 8.8 mph it would play a brief snippet of appropriate music!

If you look at any neuroscience paper, mice will run 10k a day or more on a wheel overnight. I thought the axis labels were wrong when I first saw that type of study. It’s quite common.

I love this. I feel like there’s a business and/or product line here if it doesn’t already exist (hamster habitats with integrated cameras).

We are all hamsters on Strava.

This is amazing and I love it.

I was surprised that the owner said he needed to get a Strava premium account in order to be able to auto-upload the hamster's activities. Not 100% sure why.

He might be able to use https://github.com/dlenski/stravacli (written by me) or the library it's based on (https://github.com/stravalib/stravalib) to avoid this requirement and save a few bucks.

I wonder if one could calculate the watt-hours produced in a day by a theoretical 100 hamsters on generator-attached wheels, and if you could run a laptop and LTE hotspot from that (or similar load).

Dupe of link to original post on reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216926

> my hamster now has Strava Premium

Somewhere there's a product manager looking at this and adding "multi-species household plan" to the roadmap

Dude named his hamster Mollie, but refers to it by “his” and “he.”

Must be Dutch humor.

> Over one seven-day stretch, he started within the same 10-minute window on five nights, between 9:54 and 10:04 p.m.

I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.

We feed the cat at home at the same time every day, and her internal clock definitely know when it's time less than 30' divergence. She suffers the daylight transitions immensely too because of this.

Now the real interesting part would be if people can find a way for their hamster on strava to leak the locations of not-publicized military activities.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=strava+le...