In our experience, there’s hardly ever any concern when the cat utilizes the litter box. At all. In the whole house. For hours. And while it might be immediately apparent to the most casual observer that it’s time to clean up the important things out, that doesn’t indicate there’s no worth in measuring your feline friend’s harmful vapors. For science.
Now naturally, [Owen Ashurst] might have gone with among those elegant automatic litter boxes, the kind that finds when a cat has actually made a deposit and utilizes numerous approaches to sweep it away and prepare package for the next usage, with differing degrees of success. These devices appear like excellent concepts, and normally work quite well out of package, however — well, let’s simply state that a value-engineered system can just last so long under severe conditions. So a plain old-fashioned litterbox is enough for [Owen], other than with a couple of unique adjustments. A NodeMCU lives inside the modesty cover of package, in addition to a PIR sensing unit to spot the cat’s existence, along with an MQ135 air quality sensing unit to keep an eye on for gasses. It appears a suitable option, considering that the sensing unit reacts to ammonia and sulfides — both most likely to be present after a deposit.
At power-up, the display links to WiFi, launches a web UI, and links to [Owen]’s Home Assistant circumstances through MQTT. It posts the readings from the sensing unit every number of minutes and develops a helpful chart to track the cat’s sees and whether they lead to brand-new deposits or simply checking out old good friends. One location we can see the capacity for mistake is the particulates launched simply by digging in the litter, which appears to be a popular activity for some cats.
In basic, we seem like more information is much better information, so we salute [Owen] for the effort here. If you require help handling your furry friend’s other practices, we’ve got something for that too.
