[Estefannie] is a proud cat owner, but one of her cats has a bad habit of eating plastic. That means she needs to keep an eye on that cat’s bowel movements, but with two cats in the house, it’s difficult to know who did what. Thus, she whipped up an AI system to log her cats bathroom visits and give her peace of mind.
It’s not the most glamorous project — [Estefannie] notes she took over 50,000 pictures of her cats using the litterbox to train Microsoft Azure’s Custom Vision model. But after some work, it could readily identify which cat was using the litter box when fed images from a NoIR camera. The system then differentiates between number 1 and number 2 via the time the cat spends in the litter box. It’s not perfect, but it works.
The Raspberry Pi runs a Node.JS server to collate the results, paired with a website front-end for easy data display. That way, anyone on [Estefannie’s] WiFi network can see who did what from a browser. We’ve seen cat litter boxes put on the Internet of Things before, and we’ve even seen people hack litterbox DRM, too.
I had a major plastic (sheet) eating cat that ended up getting megacolon and shortly after that diagnosis, he died, as he wasn’t having a good time of it. I tried hard to make his favorite snack unavailable, but he was more resourceful than me. Sometimes it had to be “pulled out” when he walked around with some dangling out his back side. He didn’t like that at all.
Sorry for your loss.
r/dogs has so many stories of dogs eating weird stuff… thankfully being larger they usually pass it.
I remember ‘old Harrold’ (big dog) ate a roll of electrical tape. Had poop on a rope syndrome. Resulted in humorous ‘tug of war’ with kind hearted lady. He was very irritated but fine.
I once considered starting a web site with camera. “Two dogs, one litter box’. Installed cat door instead. Cat’s job was outside anyhow (fruit trees=rats). Dogs have to search for their favorite treat.
Is this going to be a Rick Sanchez story?
This is going to start the AI rebellion.
NFC collar tags would be a lot easier than online Windows. No camera needed. Weight of cats may be enough to discriminate with sensor under the pan as well as time.
Glad my cat doesn’t eat it, but she keeps chewing on plastic. It’s super annoying. You leave bread out in a plastic bag, she chews the plastic and the bread spoils.