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.
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!
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.
I didn't downvote, but it's probably because you were splitting hairs on what is more of a Rube Golberg solution to an obviously simple problem. Not many people are taking it that as a serious cat training solution.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you create any kind of safe path in such a system, the cat will learn it quickly too.
One simpler way to go IMO would be to put the system at ground level and use two motion detectors, one aimed specifically to "see" only things that are a meter or more above the ground. Humans would trigger both, but the cat would only trigger the one aimed at the ground.
See, the advantage with that plan is that even if the cats figure out how to bypass that system, now you can assuage the pain of failure by filming the cats leaping across your yard like pogo sticks and monetize the video on YouTube. Tens of millions of views guaranteed.
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.
Cats do need to eat grass. If they didn't have access to grass, they eat any other plant they can find, including flowers. They do that to clean their digestion system from inedible parts(1), as for a home cat, that's mostly their own furballs.
"Cats regurgitate when they eat grass because they lack the necessary enzymes to break down vegetable matter. Does this mean your cat likes to throw up? Well, while it's doubtful that kitty enjoys the act, this up-chucking sensation may eliminate all indigestible matter from the cat's digestive tract, making it feel a whole lot better. This is important because cats eat their prey as is, including both the edible and inedible parts (fur, bones, feathers, etc.)"
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.
Does he hate cats? He's simply making his yard less attractive to cats in a way that does not harm his usage of his lawn. The cats don't get harmed other than getting wet, which they don't like.. but is pretty harmless.
I actually am a little tempted to blow some time implementing something similar this weekend, because an unknown animal keeps leaving droppings in my backyard at random times. I'm less annoyed with that specifically, and more just curious about the phantom pooper in general. And, well, by the time I have the pictures figured out.. I have a Rachio, which means I can turn the sprinklers on through an API call anyway.
I'm not even convinced they don't like water. My cats sure jump down from the table in a hurry if I spray them with a spray bottle, but then they jump right back up a minute later. I think they like the game more than they dislike being sprayed, sadly.
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 killing off local bird populations. Yet you don't care, because it's out of sight and out of mind. All you care about is how you feel for allowing your cat to be free, while shunning all responsibility for how your cat is impacting others.
People who keep "outdoor cats" remind me of an acquaintance I once knew who owned birds with clipped wings, kept in tiny cages for 23-24 hours a day. Her reasoning for not finding it morally reprehensible? "Well these exotic birds cannot survive our Canadian winters, they need to be kept indoors!". So... you're buying exotic birds that do not belong in our climate, mutilating them, imprisoning them... and somehow manage to revamp the logic in your head to make yourself their savior?
I hope one day aliens come to our planet, put us all in 10x10 foot cages after severing our spinal columns so we can't walk, while making sure to let us know it's for our own good and has nothing to do with their own agenda. Or the aliens can come and cohabitate with us, but let their human-eating pets roam outdoors and deny any responsibility for those pets' actions.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, not all outdoor cats are pests! My cat is too incompetent to catch any birds and she just grazes on grass, so she's actually improving my yard by making it so I don't need to mow. Now if only I could get her to consistently eat it all to a certain height...
I'm probably one of the biggest cat lovers you'll ever meet, but I don't see a problem with this. It's his yard, so he has the right to decide who hangs out there, and a lawn sprinker is a relatively humane (yet effective) deterrent.
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.
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.
The content of this article is pretty cool...but if I had to come up with a HN title that a deep learning process would surmise would do extremely well, it would be literally this. Or maybe "Show HN: How to use deep learning to optimize honey production from beehives"
edit: The title of the submission has been changed; originally, it was something like "Using Deep Learning to Keep Cats off the Lawn"
Although incredibly off topic (the Cats = upvotes meme isn't even true on Reddit), a submission title's phrasing is not the primary cause of a HN story's success/failure. (and the proposed Show HN would make me raise an eyebrow in thinking the post is linkbait and cause me to flag it)
Ah I meant less that the title itself would get upvotes, and more that the title reflects the kind of content popular on HN. Deep learning, of course. And cats, though a quick search on Algolia reveals fewer 100+ upvoted cat stories than I would anecdatally assume. Would love someday to see a survey of cat vs. dog owners among HN users (though it'd be heavily biased towards urban dwellers, e.g. SF and NY, in which cats might be the more practical choice)
I think the issue here is flagging a story without bothering to check the story. Excluding obvious dupes, the recent article posted for Greek sex escorts, and similarly irrefutable garbage, you have no defensible basis for flagging on title alone.
Real-world example:
There have been a couple articles recently posted with titles such as "Do X with all the things using this one weird trick". The articles were solid, informative, and on-topic, despite the otherwise regrettable titles. I even complained about the titles in the comments, but not the content. I could only make this judgment by reading the articles and denying my flag-hammer until I knew they weren't garbage.
I think we're disagreeing on a difference between the proverbial letter and spirit of the law/guidelines.
I'm aware of the guidelines. You can't flag for content being spammy or off-topic if you don't actually check the content, right? Hence, flagging based on titles, linkbaity or not, still seems an abuse and a failure to judiciously apply the flag-hammer privilege.
[0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...