World cup · Season 1
Every lap counts.
Runster turns your hamster's wheel into a race track. Point your phone at the wheel and speed, distance and records go straight onto the world leaderboard — or strap on the tag and measure all night.
01 · How it works
Stick, point, race.
No hardware needed to start. A piece of tape and the phone you already own is a complete timing system.
Stick the dot
Put a small piece of tape on the wheel. That single high-contrast mark is all the camera needs to see each lap.
Point the camera
The app watches the wheel at 120 fps and counts laps with autocorrelation — the same maths used in signal processing labs. Short sessions, 2–10 minutes.
Race the world
Speed, distance and personal bests are computed server-side and land on the leaderboard. Hamster days run 12:00–12:00 so a night run is never split in two.
Verified against a known reference. The camera pipeline was validated against a drill-driven test rig with a known rotation speed before a single hamster ever ran on it.
02 · The tag
Measure while you sleep.
Hamsters run at night. The tag sits on the wheel, the gateway listens by the cage, and the numbers are waiting in the app in the morning.
Season 1 hardware
“Nisse ran 2.3 km last night” — without the app even being open.
A coin-cell gyro tag on the wheel broadcasts every rotation over Bluetooth. No pairing, no app in the background, no phone left by the cage at 3 AM.
- Tag on the wheelSame double-sided tape as the dot · 8+ Hz updates
- Gateway by the cageListens 24/7 · plugs into any USB socket
- CloudBatched into the same sessions as the camera
- App in the morningDistance, top speed, records
Gyro, not a magnet
Measures rotation directly, so it works on any wheel — plastic, wood, metal, flying saucer — with no counterpart to align.
Months on a coin cell
Low-power firmware sleeps between laps and reports its own battery level, so the app tells you before it runs out.
Nothing to pair
The tag only broadcasts. No connection, no account on the tag, no cloud lock-in — the gateway can even be self-hosted.
Cross-checked by the camera
Run the camera and the tag side by side and Runster compares the lap counts. Free validation no other pet tracker offers.
03 · Health
Health, not just speed.
Reduced wheel activity is one of the earliest illness indicators in rodents — well established in laboratory animal science. A baseline turns a toy into an early-warning system.
14-day rolling median
Every hamster gets its own normal. Seasonal, age and species differences are built in.
Deviation alarms
“Nisse ran 60 % less than usual three nights in a row.” Simple statistics, genuinely useful.
Exportable history
A one-page activity report you can hand your vet — the kind of data they never get to see.
04 · FAQ
Questions
Is it safe for the hamster?
The tag weighs about as much as a coin and is fixed on the outside of the wheel, away from the running surface. The battery compartment is sealed — hamsters chew on everything, and we design for it.
Which wheels does it fit?
Any wheel with a flat surface for a 25 mm sticker: standard spoked wheels, solid wheels and flying saucers. Tell us your wheel diameter when you reserve and we'll make sure a mount exists for it.
Do I need the gateway?
For daytime sessions, no — the app can read the tag directly. For overnight measurement, yes. iOS and Android limit Bluetooth scanning in the background, so the gateway is what makes 24/7 measurement possible.
When does it ship?
Reservations fund the first production batch. No payment is taken now; we email you with a firm date and price before anything is charged, and you can cancel any time.
Which phones does the app support?
iOS today via TestFlight (120 fps camera measurement needs a recent iPhone). Android follows with the tag — it doesn't depend on the camera.