Hi folks,
I’m after some advice please.
We’re about to get a kitten, we live in a two storey house with tonne of places for the kitten to hide.
It’d be great to know where it is when we get back home, or if it decides it doesn’t want to respond, or worse if it’s trapped somewhere…
As I’m a HA addict, I thought ‘HA project!’.
I was wondering if there’s any sagely advice someone could dispense around what to do (or not).
I’m thinking a BLE tag (light weight) on the kitten’s collar - advice, recommendations?
Some beacons/collectors for around the house - advice, recommendations?
Also looking to get a smart cat flap that only opens within the proximity of the kitten’s registration chip (to get into the cat-run). - advice, recommendations?
I have great WiFi coverage and already use presence detection in HA, but I suspect WiFi tags would be a bit too cumbersome (and battery life significantly shorter comapred to BLE) for a little kitten.
I’m in Australia, this may affect some of the feedback (perhaps).
Thanks @nickrout RFID didn’t even come across my mind. It’s interesting.
I suspect the range would be quite limited. I’ve seen the vet scan our dog with their ‘wand’ and they really need to get up close to register the tag.
Makes me curious about the commercially available smart pet doors that only allow your pet in. But I’ll review those when I get a tick.
I will look further into the RFID option. I like it!
Thanks @Puneit_Thukral I wasn’t aware of room-assistant. Neat!
Some night time reading here I come.
At the outset looks like it should do what I’m after, I’m not currently running MQTT, but that’s okay.
I have one of the pet doors, it’s pretty low-tech despite the name (Hi-Tech Pet). The collars send out an ultrasonic ping every second or so. A microphone on the inside and outside of the door hears the ping and opens the door. There are potentiometers to adjust the sensitivity of the microphones (hence adjusting the distance from the collar to the door), but that’s about it.
Pretty nifty. had a look at the BLE pendants in the thread. They’re all a bit large for my kittens at this stage. Not a reflection on the platform, more on the silly requirement I have for compact wearables.
I think this is the way I’ll likely go in the near future once they’ve grown a little and I can fit something to their collars.
Perhaps just a bell at the moment then…?
Or, I could extend what I’m doing with my Arlo’s inside the house with Deepstack and track that way, not as granular, but at least I’ll have the last known location…
Since the kittens are just around 3 months old, we do not have the heart to put a collar and then a BLE tag. I spoke to the vet about microchipping and he said no one does it here. (I am in India and its not required by law here). I explained to him that I would like to do some home automations with the microchip and he gave me the look.
I think in a month or so, we may go with the BLE tracker but I am also still keen on microchipping (maybe get one implanted in my own hand). I will let you know once I start this.
Cheers
Yeah the kittens are tiny!
A BLE tag around their neck may cause skeletal problems ?
Initially we’ll just do smart food bowls and smart doors as we have RFID tags in their necks already, as it’s a requirement where we live.
I’ve been trying to do something similar.
Unfortunately most RFID scanners won’t pick up cat tags for some reason and I haven’t been able to find a BLE that looks anything other than massive round my cats necks and they’re now 7 months old.
I’m interested in indoor pet (cat) tracking too. A year after this thread, this video came up in my search, it’s using BLE-Beacons on the things/pets/etc, and ESP32-based BLE Beacon transponders sprinkled around the house:
But I’m dubious about BLE-Beacon effectiveness. Many commercial products have tried to do indoor location tracking (e.g. in museums with audio-guides), they always seem to suck. As an electronics engineer, I understand why that is (2.4GHz and all the variability in house construction and RF propagation & interference, and furniture, makes estimating location based on signal strength leave somewhat to be desired.
@CrouchingWorm, did you come up with a solution to your question from a year ago?
room assistant was mentioned before in this thread.
I use three raspberry pi Zero’s with room assistant installed and it works very reliable.
The more device running room assistant you set up in your home, the better the room presence works. Since room presence via BLE gives you the room (raspberry) your beacon is closest to, the positioning of your devices is important.
Furthermore you can fine tune room assistant by parameters like “maxDistance” or “rssiFactor”.
I ended up abandoning the project.
I also didn’t think I’d be able to get reliable results using BLE tokens that my cats would be happy to wear.
Sorry.
If you have an iPhone with UWB (or an Samsung with UWB) I’d suggest buying an Airtag or Galaxy Tab+. With UWB you’re able to track your cat down to cm. Bonus: If your cat runs away, it’s possible to find it via FindMyDevice (The AirTag communicates with every iPhone close to it in case it’s lost and that iPhone reports the location (GPS etc.) of the AirTag to you). It’s great for pets etc. and it’s super accurate indoor because of the UWB. And they’re quite cheap around 35 USD and probably light enough for a cat.
Microchipping the cat wouldn’t work because you have to have really high field strength to read the cat’s tag from meters away (it’s passive and super small).
too funny!