This project provides the source for a precise canine treat dispenser designed for numerical discrimination tasks.
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).
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.
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()
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.
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).
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
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.
The following table is necessary for this dataset to be indexed by search engines such as Google Dataset Search.
| property | value | ||||||
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| name | A precise dispenser design for canine cognition research reliability testing dataset |
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| 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. |
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| url | https://github.com/unl-cchil/canine_precise_dispenser |
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| sameAs | https://github.com/unl-cchil/canine_precise_dispenser |
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| citation | TBA |
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| hw license |
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| sw license |
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| docs license |
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