2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Keep The Prey At Bay With The Cat Valve

May 30, 2025 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Some cats are what you might call indoor cats, happy to stretch out in the lap of indoor luxury and never bother themselves with the inclement outdoors again. Others however are fully in touch with their Inner Cat, and venture forth frequently in search of whatever prey they can find.

[Rkramer] has a cat of this nature,sadly one with a propensity for returning with live prey. To avoid this problem a solution is called for, and it comes in the shape of the Cat Valve, an automated cat door which enforces a buffer zone in their cellar to prevent unwanted gifts.

It’s a simple enough idea, when an IR sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 detects the cat heading out into the world through the exterior cat flap, the computer fires up a motor connected to a lead screw which closes the flap between buffer zone and house. The cat then has the safety of the buffer zone, but can’t bring the prey fully inside.

If you’re a cat lover you’ll forgive them anything, but we have to admit to being on [Rkramer]’s side with this one. A useful way to keep the prey at bay is something we could have used a few times in the past, too. This project is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest. Done something similar for your cat? Why not make it an entry!

Exercise Wheel Tracker Confirms Suspicions About Cats

December 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

What do cats get up to in the 30 minutes or so a day that they’re awake? Being jerks, at least in our experience. But like many hackers, [Brent] wanted to quantify the activity of his cat, and this instrumented cat exercise wheel was the result.

To pull this off, [Brent] used what he had on hand, which was an M5Stack ESP32 module, a magnetic reed switch, and of course, the cat exercise wheel [Luna] seemed to be in the habit of using at about 4:00 AM daily. The wheel was adorned with a couple of neodymium magnets to trip the reed switch twice per revolution, with the pulse stream measured on one of the GPIOs. The code does a little debouncing of the switch and calculates the cat’s time and distance stats, uploading the data to OpenSearch for analysis and visualization. [Brent] kindly includes the code and the OpenSearch setup in case you want to duplicate this project.

As for results, they’re pretty consistent with what we’ve seen with similar cat-tracking efforts. A histogram of [Luna]’s activity shows that she does indeed hop on the wheel at oh-dark-thirty every day, no doubt in an effort to assassinate [Brent] via sleep deprivation. There’s also another burst of “zoomies” around 6:00 PM. But the rest of the day? Pretty much sleeping.

An Automatic Cat Feeder Built With A 4060 Binary Counter

September 6, 2024 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

We’ve seen a great many cat feeders over the years. Some rely on the Internet of Things, and some rely on fancy microcontrollers. [Larry Cook], on the other hand, built his using a simple 4060 binary counter chip.

The feeder is built out of old plywood, and the whole thing runs off an old 12-volt DC wall wart and a lead-acid battery to keep it going in a power outage. The dry cat food is stored in hopper above a drum, with the drum rotated by a 12-volt DC gearmotor. The gearmotor is activated on a schedule—either every 4 hours, or every 5.5 hours, depending on setting. There’s then a four-digit 7-segment display for counting the total number of feedings.

The manner of operation is simple. The 4060 binary counter slowly counts up to 8,196 on a 1.11 Hz or 0.83 Hz clock, for four hour or 5.5 hour operation respectively. When it hits that threshold, it fires the gear motor. The gear motor then rotates the drum for one revolution, dumping a preset amount of food. At the end of a revolution, it triggers a hall sensor which resets the circuit.

The best thing about this design? It’s been in service for ten years. [Larry’s] original video is a big contrast to his latest one, but it shows the same feeder doing the same job, all this time.

We love a good cat feeder, and it’s great to see one built with simple old-school parts, too. Video after the break.

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Can Cats Solve Puzzles?

July 26, 2024 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Cats, to those of us who appreciate their company, are fascinating creatures, with their infinite curiosity and playfulness. [Makers Muse] has a pair of half-grown-up kittens, and set out to provide them with a plaything far better than those the market could offer. The result is the Snak Attak, a gravity puzzle maze that delivers kibble for the cat prepared to puzzle it out.

The point of this exercise isn’t to give kibble but to provide the optimum play experience for a pair of younger cats. The premise is that kibble is held back by a set of wooden pegs each with a temptingly dangly string, and they should after some investigation be able to pull the pegs out and release it. What’s interesting is how the two different cats approach the problem, while one pulls the out as expected, the other pushes them from the back of the device.

The conclusion is that the two cats can indeed solve puzzles, and gain hours of play from the device. An updated version was produced with a few more challenges, and as you can see in the video below the break, it’s captivated their attention. It’s not the first cat toy we’ve brought you by any means, this robotic mouse springs to mind, but it’s certainly upped the ante on feline entertainment.

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Using OpenCV To Catch A Hungry Thief

July 18, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 17 Comments

[Scott] has a neat little closet in his carport that acts as a shelter and rest area for their outdoor cat, Rory. She has a bed and food and water, so when she’s outside on an adventure she has a place to eat and drink and nap in case her humans aren’t available to let her back in. However, [Scott] recently noticed that they seemed to be going through a lot of food, and they couldn’t figure out where it was going. Kitty wasn’t growing a potbelly, so something else was eating the food.

So [Scott] rolled up his sleeves and hacked together an OpenCV project with a FLIR Boson to try and catch the thief. To reduce the amount of footage to go through, the system would only capture video when it detected movement or a large change in the scene. It would then take snapshots, timestamp them, and optionally record a feed of the video. [Scott] originally started writing the system in Python, but it couldn’t keep up and was causing frames to be dropped when motion was detected. Eventually, he re-wrote the prototype in C++ which of course resulted in much better performance!

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Raspberry Pi Narrates (And Tattles On) Your Cat, Nature Documentary Style

May 9, 2024 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

Detecting a cat with a raspberry pi and camera is one thing, but [Yoko Li]’s AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection brings things entirely to another level by narrating your feline’s activities, nature documentary style.

The project is ostensibly aimed at tattling on the housecats by detecting forbidden behavior such as trespassing on the kitchen counter. But we daresay that’s overshadowed by the verbose image analysis, which describes the scene in its best David Attenborough impression.

This feline exemplifies both the beauty and the peaceful nature of its kind. No email will be sent as the cat is not on the kitchen counter.

Hard to believe that just a few years ago this cat detector tool was the bee’s knees in cat detection technology. Things have certainly come a long way. Interested? The GitHub repository has everything needed to roll your own and we highly recommend watching it in action in the video, embedded below.

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2023

October 8, 2023 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Too much of a good thing is generally a bad thing, but a surfeit of asteroid material is probably a valid exception to that rule. Such was NASA’s plight as it started to unpack the sample return capsule recently dropped off by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it flew by Earth, only to discover it was packed to overflowing with samples of asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft, which arrived at Bennu in 2018 and spent a good long time mapping the near-Earth asteroid, apparently approached its carefully selected landing site a bit too energetically and really packed the sample container full of BennuBits™ — so much so that they could actually see sample shedding off into space before stowing it for the long trip back to Earth. The container is now safely in the hands of the sample analysis team, who noted that everything in the TAGSAM (Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Module), even the avionics deck, is covered with black particles, each precious one of which needs to be collected and cataloged. The black stuff is especially interesting to planetary scientists, as it might be exactly what they were after when they selected Bennu, which may have broken off a much larger carbon-rich asteroid a billion or so years ago. It’ll be interesting to see if these interplanetary hitchhikers have anything to tell us about the origin of life in the solar system.

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