After making a dog-shaped treat machine powered by an arduino + servo, I wanted to try the same idea with purely mechanical workings. And so was born the Kitty Pinball Machine!

It started out with super rough prototyping to figure out the geometry needed to get the flipper action working for a cat-sized being

From there I built up a draftboard version of the basic machine. The pinball parts are separated from the treat dispensing parts by a spinner that spans both layers. The pinball hit the spinner and the spinner hits the treat out of the chute

Then I tested it with my cat to see if the idea would even work… and it did! Proof of concept was a success! = ^.^=

I wanted to just use acrylic for a shiny finished look (and avoid using paint) so I had to make some adjustments until the acrylic version worked smoothly

Then it was just a final design pass to create the ‘Fish tank’ look

I’m super happy with how this came out, and my cat loves to play with it. I’m still wrapping up a few build things, but am going to share the SVG files for other people to make it too