About Me
Hi! My name is Honey. I am a Syrian long-haired hamster. Sometimes we are called teddy bear hamsters. Can you see why?
My species is nocturnal in captivity. While our caretakers sleep, we like to run up to 5 miles a night. That's quite a distance for our pint-sized stature if I may say so.
True to my kind, I absolutely love to run in my hamster wheel. I used it so much that my adoptive family decided to instrument my wheel to calculate how far I ran each night.
My Running Log
I've run a total of 1,886.3 miles in my wheel from August 23rd, 2020 to January 18th, 2022. Here's my progress over that time.
Interactive running calendar — no longer active.
About My Wheel
My exercise wheel has two ball bearings that roll around a central bolt fed through a metal stand. The construction keeps the wheel from squeaking and my fur from getting caught in an exposed axle. This design also makes it easy to attach a magnet to the back of the wheel and a magnetic field sensor to its stand.
The magnet passes in front of the sensor once for every full revolution of my wheel. The sensor registers the presence of the magnet with a change in voltage on one of the wires leading to a computer. A program running on the computer counts how many times the sensor registers the magnet every minute. It saves the count to disk at the end of each minute.
The computer uploads the rotation counts for the past hour to Amazon S3. The computer then instructs Amazon Athena to add up all the rotations, add up all the rotations prior to 7 days ago, and add up all the rotations per hour over the last 7 days. Athena stores these numbers in S3 also.
The website downloads the numbers computed by Athena and uses them to show the running log. It turns the numbers into distances by multiplying the rotation counts by the circumference of the wheel, π × d = π × 8.5 inches = 26.7 inches. That's how far Honey would have traveled in a straight line on the ground for each full turn of her wheel.
Parts List
Here's everything needed to put together a wheel and website like this. The upfront cost for all the parts is about $80. The cost of running the website can be as low as $1 per month but depends on the number of visitors.
- One 9 inch SilentRunner exercise wheel
- One ceramic disc magnet
- One SunFounder switch Hall sensor module
- One double-sided foam adhesive mounting pad
- Three breadboard jumper wires
- One (really old) Raspberry Pi 1 Model A+
- One data pipeline
- One dynamic website