Tracking how far my cats walk/run on the One Fast Cat Wheel

Some time ago now we bought a One Fast Cat Wheel for our darling pussycats. They loved it since day one and enjoying showing off by jumping inside and going for a run when we are around. It wasn’t until we installed a camera in the kitchen (partly for security, partly to keep an eye on the misbehaving cats at night) that we realised just how much they use the wheel. And so I came up with the idea of using a cycle computer to track their usage.

I didn’t want this to be an expensive experiment so I found the cheapest cycle computer I could find on Amazon which could be set to any wheel circumference.

I had to dismantle the piece that connects to the spokes of a bike as they are not needed in this scenario. This involved smashing the piece of plastic to get to the magnet.

To test if this was going to work I used some blue tack to secure the magnet on the inside of the wheel and blob of blue tack to position the sensor so that it would detect the magnet as it passed by. When Setting up the cycle computer you have to enter a wheel circumference which I measured as 365 cm, this way the computer knows every time the magnet passes the sensor - 365 cm of distance has been covered. Due to the wheel size and also the power of cats the speedometer function of the computer is less useful and accurate, it might work if I could place several magnets at regular intervals along the wheel rim, but this is not how these computers are designed to work. The RPM of a bicycle is always going to be much higher.

Now is time for a quick test, give the wheel a spin and see if the Computer picks up the rotation. Hurrah success! Next I used some cable ties to hold the mount in place, taped down the cable and then the cats got involved.

Since being installed I have been tracking the distance travelled most days. The below chart is record of the distance covered between our two Burmese cats over the past 26 days, totally an impressive 29.129 km (18.099 miles).