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Chasing Cats

myplace.frontier.com

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: Chasing Cats

#51
post #34

wonder if it works at night. This proved to be too much to crack for a Pascal VOC trained model I tried - https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61pY4UVbHxL...

You could try finetuning training; take the Pascal imageset, do image augmentation (ImageMagick has routines for darkening and 'midnight'-coloring images) to mimic nightime appear; retrain.

Re: Chasing Cats

#52
post #37

I definitely want this system! But instead of cats, I want it to detect Fedex and UPS delivery drivers. And instead of turning on the sprinklers, I want it to ring my doorbell so that I know there's a package sitting on my front porch.

I need this too. We have a Kuna installed on our front door and it's as if all delivery people know it's there and they try their hardest to avoid its detection. I've seen UPS and USPS walk in very odd ways that just barely don't appear on camera and cranking the sensitivity up ends up catching all passing cars on our semi-busy road. I haven't found a good balance and they almost never ring the doorbell even if it's raining.

Re: Chasing Cats

#53
post #38
post #32

What did those cats do to him...?

Only guess is crawling on cars and leaving little paw-prints, that's the only common thing I can think of. Occasionally known for getting up under the hood or something, which doesn't turn out so well for the cat, either. Though I'm sure individual cats could have their own undesirable quirks. With dogs, you get the pooping (which is at least half an owner problem), squirrels dig up my yard, gophers same, ants all ov…

Cats poop too! And flower gardens are some of their favorite spots, because the dirt is so easy to kick back up.

Re: Chasing Cats

#54

Why does this guy hates cats so much?

Chances are the cats are digging in his yard/garden/flower bed and leaving feces everywhere, or leaving dead animals in his yard. Outdoor cats are destructive pests; it should be illegal to allow pet cats to roam freely outdoors. If you think it's "natural" and your cats should be free to roam, then you simply should not own cats. Your cat is not just "visiting neighbours". It is destroying other people's yards and k…

Right on with your view of the birds with clipped wings but your cat view...I mean, did you have a bad experience or something? I've known quite a lot of people (especially farmers) who keep outdoor cats and they rarely destroy anything beyond killing some pests. In fact outdoor cats are HUGELY valuable for farms because of pest control.

Some animals will become pests no matter what but I've never met someone with such a negative view of outdoor cats it was just a bit surprising.

Re: Chasing Cats

#55

I have a problem with my neighbor's cats deciding to pee and poop in my front yard. I decided to go with a few of these: https://www.amazon.com/PetSafe-KIT19001-SSScat/dp/B000RIA95G . They worked reasonably well, but the cats have learned that if they run quickly past one, it won't hiss. So now I'm thinking of modifying them so they use an IR beam, and a beam interruption would trigger the hiss. The eternal battle go…

since the sprayers have a configurable spray width I think you could get pretty far with some sort of wide-angle sensor (a few ultrasonic range finders, or maybe a Kinect?) placed at one long-edge end of the lawn and use that to trigger sprayers laid out perpendicular to the camera.

Re: Chasing Cats

#56
post #19

This is great. There's a project that's the inverse as well: http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm A door that only lets cats in, based on image recognition. As an aside, I've really enjoyed the particle photon so far. It was a little wonky at first when they didn't have persistent storage of state changes, but now that's up and running, it's flawless. It runs the lights in my house (via a relay j…

I've used Photons for a bunch of projects, and they're great. They do sometimes get into weird states that require a reboot. And I'm not a huge fan of the web IDE, but there are workarounds (and sometimes I just bite the bullet and deal with it). However, regardless of those complaints, it's a fun platform for projects, and it has almost completely replaced my use of Arduinos at this point.

I own a lot of Photons (and Spark Cores! :P), I've even bought large amounts for hands-on classes, but I've fallen in love with the ESP8266. You can program it using a custom build of the Arduino IDE (if you want), one of my projects lives off a cheap 3.7V battery pack for weeks at a time. I love it! My favorite time spent with hardware hacks was in my AVR and PICAXE days, the ESP8266 gives me the best feelings about those + modern conveniences.

The future is looking really exciting too, Particle's new cellular chips open up a lot of possibilities (especially with their out of the box no-need-to-use-a-dynamic-dns-system), and I will definitely litter my apartment with ESP32s -- built-in bluetooth 4.2, that can talk to the built-in bluetooth on my new Raspberry Pis, I love 2016!

Re: Chasing Cats

#57

Why does this guy hates cats so much?

My problems with my neighbors cats: destroyed flower beds because they like to rest on the fresh shade, remains of doves carcasses in my lawn, urine and feces where my children go play and even in the vegetable garden,...

Yes, there is an advantage on they being around: it keeps the squirrels away from my berry bushes. But I still would prefer they didn't come.

Re: Chasing Cats

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chances are the cats are digging in his yard/garden/flower bed and leaving feces everywhere, or leaving dead animals in his yard. Outdoor cats are destructive pests; it should be illegal to allow pet cats to roam freely outdoors. If you think it's "natural" and your cats should be free to roam, then you simply should not own cats. Your cat is not just "visiting neighbours". It is destroying other people's yards and k…

Right on with your view of the birds with clipped wings but your cat view...I mean, did you have a bad experience or something? I've known quite a lot of people (especially farmers) who keep outdoor cats and they rarely destroy anything beyond killing some pests. In fact outdoor cats are HUGELY valuable for farms because of pest control. Some animals will become pests no matter what but I've never met someone with su…

I have cat hoarding neighbors. It can be a real problem. Feces. Hair. Mice (read: flies). Also, I have a son with a flea allergy.

A cat or two never bothers me. But when my neighbor gets to putting out 5 or 6 food dishes for the strays each Spring, we can easily find a dozen cats in our back yard.

Re: Chasing Cats

#60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Photons for a bunch of projects, and they're great. They do sometimes get into weird states that require a reboot. And I'm not a huge fan of the web IDE, but there are workarounds (and sometimes I just bite the bullet and deal with it). However, regardless of those complaints, it's a fun platform for projects, and it has almost completely replaced my use of Arduinos at this point.

I own a lot of Photons (and Spark Cores! :P), I've even bought large amounts for hands-on classes, but I've fallen in love with the ESP8266. You can program it using a custom build of the Arduino IDE (if you want), one of my projects lives off a cheap 3.7V battery pack for weeks at a time. I love it! My favorite time spent with hardware hacks was in my AVR and PICAXE days, the ESP8266 gives me the best feelings about…

You're excitement is definitely contagious! I'm always wondering what people do with these things though? What kind of projects? Just getting started with electronics myself and not quite sure what to make of microcontrollers yet.
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