Critter Twitter Trap Traps Critters, Pings Twitter

Got aliens in your attic? Squirrels in the skirting board? You need a trap, and [John Mangan] has come up with an interesting way to let you know that you have caught that pesky varmint: the IoT Critter Twitter Trap. By adding a ball switch, Electric Imp and a couple of batteries to a trap, he was able to set the trap to notify him when it caught something over Twitter. To do this, he programmed the Electric Imp to send a message over when a varmint trods on the panel inside the trap, slamming its door shut. The whole thing cost him less than $60 and can be seen in action after the break.

This is a pretty neat hack. I used to help with a Feral Fix program, where feral cats would be trapped, neutered and returned to the wild. This involved baiting the trap, then waiting hours in the cold nearby for the ferals to get comfortable enough to climb inside and trigger the trap. [John’s] version would only work indoors (as it uses WiFi), but it wouldn’t be that difficult to add a cell phone dongle or other RF solution to extend the range. With this hack, I could have at least waited somewhere warmer, while the trap would ping me when it was triggered.

8 thoughts on “Critter Twitter Trap Traps Critters, Pings Twitter

    1. Yeah, we’ve been rather concentrating on commercial customers vs makers (hence things like the dual-band-plus-ethernet imp005). Over half a million commercial devices in the wild these days, plus enterprise servers for big customers etc.

      Still a nice open platform with great support :)

  1. This… Again? Next post like this will have a project plan on how to use the weight of non-RFID tagged creature to go into the compost heap and re-bait the trap. Without IoT.

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