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Chasing Cats

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Re: Chasing Cats

#61

Post by danharaj »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #54
developer2 wrote: post #41

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…

Outdoor cats are a scourge on songbirds.

Re: Chasing Cats

#62

Post by simmons »

byuu wrote: 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 that, too! (Why can't FedEx be bothered to ring the doorbell?) I sometimes wonder if instead of video, it might be easier to do audio analysis to detect the sound of the UPS truck, which tends to be rather unique in my neighborhood.

Re: Chasing Cats

#63

Post by EvanAnderson »

6502nerdface wrote: post #43

I remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not. [0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

Flo Control! Yes! The daily picture archives on the site were great. I especially liked the ones where other neighborhood animals (a skunk and a raccoon, if memory serves) tried to get in and were denied admittance.

Re: Chasing Cats

#64

Post by jc4p »

rashkov wrote: post #60
jc4p wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the kind words, reading your message made me smile :)

I think the most interesting and quickest to explain thing I've done with these chips (the ESP8266) was a chain of temperature/humidity sensors packed in my office building.

I only ended up building out a couple (soldering by hand on prototype boards) but I used a ESP8266 + 1200mAh battery pack + DHT22 sensors to make small modules we could put in different corners of the building. We had A/C issues during hot summers and it's a lot easier to report them to the building management by saying "4 conference rooms have been above 80 degrees all day". The modules woke themselves up every 30 min, waited until a stable recording was captured, then POST'd their hardcoded label (like "Corner office"), the temperature, the humidity, and the time to a Heroku server (which when loaded in a browser simply spat out all records).

At home, the one semi-recent project I've been most proud of was a remote trigger for my A/C. I used a Raspberry Pi with both an IR emitter and a IR sensor attached, taught it my cheap window A/C unit's remote's codes, then emulated them to turn the A/C on and off based on a server and small app that did geofencing. My apartment didn't have built-in A/C, but it started cooling off the second I walked out of my office at around 6 PM on a weekday :)

If you're interested in building things, you should get a Raspberry Pi 3 or one of these chips (and a pack of sensors/inputs) well before you have an idea. I set them up with access on my WiFi then just leave them in a corner for months (sometimes years) before I use them for anything, but I think the most important part is having the smallest barrier from "ooh! what if!" to initial prototype.

Re: Chasing Cats

#65

Post by chrissnell »

6502nerdface wrote: post #43

I remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not. [0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

Let's not forget another back-in-the-old-days Slashdot favorite, the Bender Defender! The guy that built a cat motion detector in Linux and used it to trigger a blender and strobe lights!

http://www.plasma2002.com/blenderdefender/

Re: Chasing Cats

#66

Post by mrfusion »

discardorama wrote: post #50

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…

You can leave that outdoors? Would it keep birds away from blueberries?

Re: Chasing Cats

#67

Post by Mao_Zedang »

nostromo wrote: post #39

A guy did something similar, but manual, to keep people from peeing in the alley behind his building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r77lEmGaCXI I bet people would pay real money for a system like this.

That was extremely an funny video

Re: Chasing Cats

#68

Post by gsmethells »

6502nerdface wrote: post #43

I remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not. [0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

Long live CmdrTaco. Avid slashdot reader since '98.
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