After seeing this project, we can say that [James] must be a top-tier roommate. He has two flatmates– one human, one feline, and the feline flatmate’s litterbox was located in a bathroom close to the other human’s room. The odors were bothersome. A bad roommate might simply say that wasn’t their problem, but not [James].
Instead, he proclaimed “I shall build a poopopticon to alert me so I may clean the litterbox immediately, before smells can even begin to occur, thus preserving domestic harmony!”* We should all aspire to be more like [James].
It was, admittedly, a fairly simple project. Rather than dive into feline facial recognition, since it only has to detect a single cat, [James] used a simple IR sensor out of his parts bin, the sort you see on line-following robots. The microcontroller, an ESP8266, also came from his parts bin, making this project eligible for the ‘lowest budget’ award, if the contest had one.
The ESP8266 is set to send a message to a waiting webhook. In this case it is linked to a previous project, a smart ‘ring light’ [James] uses to monitor his Twitch chats. He’s also considered hooking it up to his lazy-esp32-banner for a big scrolling ‘change the litterbox!’ message. Since it’s just a webhook, the sky is the limit. Either way, the signal gets to its recipient and the litter gets changed before it smells, ensuring domestic bliss at [James]’ flat. If only all our roommates had been more like [James], we’d be much less misanthropic today.
- He did not, in fact, say that.
Missed opportunity for a “fecal recognition” joke if I ever saw one. I would think one obvious problem is that urine is warm too? I guess false positives are better than false negatives in this case.
my cats have hated each other since i decided to go look at the local box of free kittens. looking at a box of kittens usually means you leave with a kitten and i had 2 cats at the time already. at first they seemed to hit it off. the older male was still alive and in charge. and the chubby female tux seemed to like having a new kitty to play with. when he passed (at the age of 18 mind you), there was some argument between the new kitty and the chubby kitty as to who would be top cat. since both were female, they engaged in a passive aggressive warfare of seeing who could pee on the most things. i converted a flashlight to uv so i could find the spots. so i opened up another litter box, this seemed to help somewhat. the young kitty grew up the chubby kitty got chubbier and older and now has bladder control issues. the young kitty doesnt want to feel left out and so sometimes also goes on the floor. it seems like they have resumed their old rivalry. in a few years when the chubby kitty inevitably has a coronary, i think we will be a one cat house. or maybe get a couple siblings from the same litter. getting them fixed helps, but do it early.
Getting at most one female also helps, assuming the males are castrated in time.
I’ve had two or three cats at a time for years, but always just males or one female and one or two males.
Male cats will hiss and growl and fight a bit for at most a few months, and be inseparable after that, in my experience. After my last male cat died (at age 19), I only have two females left, and the fight and terrorize each other absolutely constantly.
you could probibly just use a methane sensor, look for a spike in gas emissions.
So the tables have turned….they monitor you in the bathroom and now you can monitor theirs.
Shifting and shaking on a regular basis including removing solids does wonders, more than once a day. They have a cat box with screen on the bottom helping ventilation dry things out. When puddles stay wet is when things start to smell. Just like a lid on kitchen trash makes it worse than when things get to dry out.