Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chasing Cats

myplace.frontier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 93 posts

Re: Chasing Cats

#81

Post by discardorama »

mrfusion wrote: post #66
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?

I've left it outdoors, and it's still working. I did cover the top (where the batteries are) with some plastic to prevent water from going in.

It should work against birds, as long as the IR detector can sense a change. The bird must stay in one place for a couple of seconds at least.

Re: Chasing Cats

#83

Post by fao_ »

fao_ wrote: post #74
chrissnell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

It's probably easier to find something smelly the cat hates (Like a vapour rub), and place that where you don't want the cat to go.

I understand that this is taboo, but I am utterly baffled as to why I lost karma for this.

Creating a system to traumatise a cat is objectively more harmful than making areas you don't want a cat to go repulsive to the cat.

I've seen the latter method work beautifully with nervous cats, kittens, older cats, etc. Whereas I would have reservations about using the former method with those types of cats because it serves to be startling and traumatic to a cat.

Re: Chasing Cats

#84

Post by knicholes »

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.

Instead of ringing the doorbell, it could send a text-message. That way, if you have sleeping babies, you won't end up having to deal with them waking.

Re: Chasing Cats

#85

Post by bduerst »

chrissnell wrote: post #65
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/

What makes this even better is that they didn't give it a way to deal with false positives - like friends visiting and getting a glass of water.

"It's a feature not a bug."

Re: Chasing Cats

#86

Post by dguaraglia »

jacobsladder wrote: post #6

Why does this guy hates cats so much?

I don't know about this guy in particular, but I've been in a situation where I wished I had something like this. There's a small front yard in front of my old bedroom at my parents' house. Every night, around 2am, a bunch of cats would start meowing and hissing. This would go on, in a crescendo, for about 10 minutes and culminate in a five second all-out physical fight. Cat fights are insane. If you've never heard one, they are LOUD.

Don't get me wrong, the whole thing was hilarious, and I used to interject little "meows" every now and then just to confuse the cats. It wasn't as funny when I needed to be awake early for an exam or, later in life, while I spent a few months recovering from pretty harsh medical treatment. The solution was keeping a bucket of water next to the window and just get them soaked. That would stop them for a couple weeks at a time.

Re: Chasing Cats

#88

Post by wila »

developer2 wrote: post #41
jacobsladder wrote: post #6

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…

Not sure on why the downvotes. I love cats, but used to have the problem you describe. Lots of cat feces in the garden from our friendly neighborhood cats.

Nowadays however we have our own cat. So no more cat shit from the neighbors. That helped wonderfully. Our cat loved to go outdoors, but after a while every other day he catched another bird and was nice enough to bring home his catch. So while it's pretty good for him, he lost his outdoor privileges.

That is.. he still gets to go outdoors, but nowadays I walk him. Yip, that's right, I'm the loony tune that walks his cat. Cats are not the easiest to teach to walk on a leash. But he got used to it and loves it. In fact he asks me to walk him several times a day. Unless it rains then he sleeps.

It's not like walking a dog where you tell the dog where to go, but it's more like you're the dog. He tells you where we go (if we go that is, because he likes to sniff around more as walk)

Anyways, just wanted to say that there are other alternatives for cat lovers then having them terrorize the neighbors and catch birds.

Re: Chasing Cats

#89

Post by jc4p »

msthomaa wrote: post #80
jc4p wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

How much time does ESP8266 plus sensor run before running out?

In that project they ran for less than a minute once every 30 min, on my 1200mAh they lasted around 2 weeks if I remember correctly. There's a lot of reading material online about sending the ESP8266 into standby mode.
Post reply on HN