I recently invested in an automatic pet feeder for my cats. I got it so that I could more comfortably take off for the weekend and not worry about my cats binging on (and then purging) the food I’ve left out. I originally thought it would only be used when we headed out of town, but it’s become a main attraction here at the house. The problem is that it can only handle dry food, so I still have to open up stinky cans of food (or bags of raw food) once a day when I’m here. So now I’m looking for a cat-loving engineer who wants to make me a soft food dispenser using an old VCR.

The folks over at Make published a tutorial on how to make an automatic pet feeder out of an old VCR and meat grinder. Warning, this pet project isn’t for noobs. I read the directions and I barely get how this is all supposed to play out, but in essence, you’re using the motor from the removed video head drum to propel food from a metal hopper head to a small gearbox that pushes it through a meat grinder. Set the recording timer on your VCR for when you want the food to be pushed out. How long you “record” for will determine how much food is pushed through.

The big question here is, can your cats resist the urge to knock the whole thing over to get to the copious amounts of wet food sitting within the hopper above. I know our cats would.