Chasing Cats

[6502nerdface]

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...

[chrissnell]

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/

[EvanAnderson]

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.

[gsmethells]

Long live CmdrTaco. Avid slashdot reader since '98.

[RickS]

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 just like OP) and has recovered from a few power outages with no attention necessary from me.

[monorailz]

The archive.org capture linked elsewhere ITT has more details, including more pictures and a couple of videos.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

[zippergz]

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.

[byuu]

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.

[BinaryIdiot]

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.

[simmons]

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.

[knicholes]

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.

[nostromo]

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.

[Mao_Zedang]

That was extremely an funny video

[js2]

Squirrel hunting, also using a water deterrent and Python:

https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/kgrandis/pycon-2012-milita...

[dejv]

There is also video of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4

[alexandrerond]

I had expected information on how to tell cats apart from other moving things. Looks like this can be easily achieved with a raspberry pi, the PiCam and the motion software.

[discardorama]

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 goes on.

[jc4p]

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.

[mrfusion]

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

[yoo1I]

I like how he's training a neural network to, in turn, train the cats to avoid his lawn.

[mmanfrin]

A similar DIY approach to dealing with cats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goZ2DqMnaGc

[anotherevan]

Hadn't seen his second video! Here's his first attempt which is also quite entertaining.

https://youtu.be/uIbkLjjlMV8

[aab0]

How necessary is the deep model there? It seems like a simple motion detector would work just as well since he doesn't mention using the lawn himself.

[dharma1]

Semantic segmentation/FCN isn't necessary since the spray isn't targeting the cat location specifically - you could just use a whole image classifier. You don't need a TX1 either, you could run this on a spare phone

https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile.html

http://mxnet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/how_to/smart_device.ht...

https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK

[RickS]

This could certainly be done well sans deep model, but a motion detector alone would probably end up soaking the occasional delivery guy / neighborhood kid.

[emeraldd]

Looks like there is a sidewalk through the lawn. Which probably means using a motion detector would force him to sacrifice using the front door.

[zump]

Yeah this guy needs to read more. Anything that could perform a simple matrix multiplication could be used.

[pmille5]

What did those cats do to him...?

[rconti]

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 over the place. Can't say I've ever had an issue with cats, but I trust the creator of the project has a reason, and as a cat lover, I'd laugh my ass off at video of a cat getting hit by surprise sprinklers.

[gerbilly]

How about using wolf urine as a repellent?

https://www.predatorpeestore.com/wolf-urine-for-bobcat-probl...

[a-seeing-cue]

You don't need a fully convolutional network, just a regular CNN for image recognition

[addled]

And when he gets old and crotchety, he can train the model on children as well.

[soared]

An SSD for this makes all me and all my HDDs want to cry.

[dharma1]

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...

[aab0]

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.

[abhi152]

Did the Cat's behavior change ?

[asimuvPR]

I do enjoy how overly complicated this is. Wonder what we will be building in five years.

[ASalazarMX]

I fear in a few decades we would buy a cheap robot and command it to scare the cats perpetually.

[Qwertious]

For some reason, I expected this to be a sequel to "Chasing Ice".

[dzolvd]

So he likes dogs doing their business in his yard but not cats?

[dzolvd]

Missed that there were specific culprits: "the neighbors' cats"