Dogs may be man’s best friend, but cats are certainly a hacker’s best muse. They provide so many ‘reasons’ for projects, like this cat door which [Clement] augmented to monitor the comings and goings of his feline friend (translated). He’s using a web service we hadn’t heard of before called PushingBox to send notifications like Tweets and Emails from the Arduino monitoring that door.
The two white rectangles attached to the cat door in the image above are magnets commonly used for entry door monitoring. Using a pair of them along with reed switches lets the system differentiate between an incoming or outgoing cat. The Arduino is web-connected and running the PushingBox API to manage the notification messages. See a demo of the system in the clip after the break.
This would be a nice addition to the cat door we saw [Dino] build. Of course, if you really want to go all out with the cat hacks the next project should be a GPS tracking collar.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxlVAa3VC5U&w=470]
How often does the cat rip the wires out of the exposed breadboard?
Perfect for horrible owners that het their cat roam the neighborhood. You freak out of my dog wanders unleashed and craps in your card, yet your kitty is allowed to pee and crap in my yard? Cat urine is 800X more nasty than anything a dog leaves.
Keep your cat indoors or on a tie out.
The ultimate cat door is the one that recognizes one specific cat by the profile shape of its head, blocking all other cats as well as the desired cat if it’s carrying stuff in its mouth.
Thus only the owner’s cat can get in the house and it has to leave its “gifts” of dead animals outside.
Many pets make sure our cities are not overrun with mice and rats. However, places without domestic predators often indirectly increase populations of urban wildlife like the American jackal or prairie wolf. Note the urban wildlife doesn’t make a diet distinction between cats, dogs, or garbage.
Pushingbox is pretty cool. I’m going to tie it into the RFID access system at Bloominglabs, then it can keep track of hackers comings and goings.