Hello, I made a smart mousetrap. The mousetrap indicates how many times the trap has been activated. Our little weekend cottage has problems with mice from time to time, sometimes doing a lot of damage, so I have made a smarter solution that lets me know if we have visitors while we are not there, and I can hopefully intervene before too much damage is done next time.
The basis of my solution is the “Victor multikill” (https://www.victorpest.com/victor-multi-kill-electronic-mouse-trap-m260). This device does not have any smart or wifi connection like some of the other models from Victor, however it does capture up to 10 rodents and resets itself after each capture.
The Victor multikill is easy to take apart with screws holding it together. Inside is the chamber which rotates when a capture has been made.
To make this device smart I purchased the z-wave door sensor from sensative called sensative guard https://sensative.com/sensors/strips-zwave/guard/
The sensative strips consist of a small magnet part and the electronics in a separate strip. Both the magnet and the strip are self adhesive. I was able to find a place to put the magnet on the rotating “chamber” where it doesn’t impede with anything else when the chamber rotates. If you look in the photo above you can see the rectangular magnet attached on the right hand side. The receiver is mounted on the outside once the device is reassembled. The two parts are not as close together as I would have liked but it does seem to be working with the strips on the outside as shown in the photos, and the magnet on the outside of the chamber. It is easy to check if closed/open is working by manually rotating the chamber back and forth.
The sensative strips works by indicating whether a “door” is open or closed. Closed when the strips and the magnet are close together, and open otherwise. In my case “closed” means that the mousetrap is idle, “open” means that the chamber has rotated and is dealing with a captured rodent. The rotating chamber returns to the idle position after a few seconds and the device goes back to “closed”.
I installed the z-wave smart strips to samsung smartthings, which seems to have adequate support for sensative strips, and my smartthings hub is integrated with my home assistant. Other z-wave solutions will probably work too. The important thing is to be able to capture the change between open and close states.
If there is a “kill” then the light on the mousetrap will blink, but I also now have a way to remotely monitor and count using the sensative device. My implementation depends on the SmartThings integration:
After installing the sensative strips in smartthings and restarting home assistant, the mousetrap shows up in the integration:
This entity simply shows whether the trap is “idle” or “active” depending on the open/closed state. You can look in the device log to see whether there has been any activity, but to take it one step further I implemented a counter with a reset date.
First create a datetime helper in the Configuration->Helpers section of home assistant. Here is how mine looks in the Helpers section:
This datetime helper is used when the trap is emptied of any captures to manually indicate the time and date when it was reset.
I used this to create a history_stats entity that then indicates how many “kills” since the reset date:
sensor
- platform: history_stats
name: trap 1 kitchen
state: 'on'
entity_id: binary_sensor.mouse_trap_1_contact
type: count
end: "{{ now() }}"
start: "{{ as_timestamp((states.input_datetime.trap_reset.attributes.timestamp)|timestamp_local) }}"
The entity sensor.trap_1_kitchen will then indicate how many activations of the mousetrap there have been since the reset date and can be displayed in an entity list in my lovelace dashboard.
