Here's a project that I built to feed my cat when I am away for short trips. It uses a commercial dry cereal dispenser, stepper motor that was hacked into an old HP Laserjet gearbox, ATMega8 AVR microcontroller, and standard mechanical AC lamp timer. http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2009/02/automatic-cat-feeder.html http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2009/08/improved-automatic-cat-feeder.html