So you’ve successfully taught your cats to use your toilet, just like little furry humans. Congratulations! But you can’t quite teach the cat to pull the flush lever? You might want to automate it for them instead! (Editor’s note, 2019. Link seems to be dead. Try the Wayback Machine.)
[Joycelin & Dan] are in the final stages of teaching their cats to use the toilet. Unfortunately they had a snowboarding trip coming up, and were worried about the cats losing progress when they couldn’t flush the toilet for them. Rather than have a bit of a setback in their toilet training, they improvised — and automated the toilet.
There are commercial solutions available, but they cost several hundred dollars. You could strap a geared motor to the side of your toilet with a stick screwed to it like this guy did, but who wants to pay for the water bill of flushing your toilet every few minutes??
[Dan] ended up designing a 3D printed bracket that sits under the toilet reservoir lid to hold a fairly beefy stepper motor. The stepper motor pulls the flapper valve up, allowing the toilet to flush. It’s controlled by an Arduino and set to flush once or twice a day to keep the kitty excrement at bay.
If you’re still scooping litter, or have one of those fancy auto-cleaning litter boxes, check out this hack from yesteryear on disabling the CatGenie cartridge, to allow you to use it for longer without having to buy a new one!
[Thanks for the tip Keith!]
I’ve heard that it is actually a bad idea to train your cat to flush. Turns out they find it entertaining to watch and will spend lots of time amusing themselves by running up your water bill.
I sincerely believe that could be the case. As it is two of my cats will come and watch the shower drain when I’m done, and sometimes the toilet itself. One of them will even drink from the sink.
They definitely are entertained! I programmed this one to flush once every 8 hours though.. Seemed like a good compromise between the water bill and hygiene.
A would use a delay of several minutes after the cat used the toilet. This has three advantages:
1) Cat will not get wet by the flush if it sits longer
2) Cat will probably not have the possible immediate-reward effect of play and fun which could form this habit
3) And if (2) is wrong, it limits the water use
Dammit you beat me to it.
Thats the trick.
Tomorow this will be a product sold for tons.
And who did the work? HAD AND ITS READERS.
The real problems start when the cat starts experiment to what will flush and what will not flush replacing toilet when only god knows what got trapped in the trap gets expensive.
Let’em s*it in the neighbours garden, like God intended!
At first no god exists (*), second I don’t have a garden or a neighbors garden, at least not near my appartement, where I have my cats.
*) Except the cat perhaps :-)
Then where do you bury the bodies of your enemies? :O
He eats them to gain their power, like any self respecting godless heathen. At least that’s what I do.
So does it use a Passive Cat Sensor?
What? no IOT? Forget wifi, run some…. Cat5.
This project needs an Ir detector and a manual flush detector (switch or phototransistor).
Arduino code:
If IR goes from high to low (after being high for more than 5 seconds) flush after one minute.
Works with kids too.
If you drop your wedding band, you need to pull the plug!
Opps this isn’t Reddit. I need to proofread before posting:
The reason for the manual flush detector is to prevent flushing if it’s manually during the one minute grace period.
@James Hobson, I am utterly disappointed by the lack of feline in the article picture. Good hack, though!
Unhappy kitty if she falls into the toilet and it flushes while she’s struggling to get out.
Woa woa! You are right. Some laser beams are required to check there is nothing in the toilet while flushing.
James, Is it possible to apply this automatic flush echnology in real life? I doubt that.
I agree with you, actually, this is not possible to implement in our real life, maybe we use can the automatic toilet that available on the open market or something. what do you think, James?
James, yeah I have tried to automate but I lack programming skills and don’t have enough time for the hack.