We’re big fans of cats here at Adafruit but we can totally understand where Joshua was coming from when he built this anti-cat sprinkler system; it would be super annoying to have a bunch of random cats using your garden as a toilet! Luckily, Josh was able to use his pi to humanely make sure these cats won’t ever want to visit his garden again! Via the register via hack a day.

It’s a tip of the hat today to Reg reader Joshua Thumim for putting the humble Raspberry Pi into the service of humanity with a simple but effective feline repellent system.

Joshua explained:

For the last few years, pretty much every time I (or my two small kids) wanted to use the garden I’d first have to remove 3-5 cat turds of varying stages of decomposition.

I probably don’t need to explain how disgusting that is, or how irritating to know that these cats belonged to my neighbours who had nice turd-free gardens thanks to being cat owners. It was a question of beat them or join them, and I was damned if i was going to join them.

I did try several alternatives first, but nothing really worked, and eventually my patience ran out. Think Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

Well, the Brit Michael Douglas hit the shed with the following kit:

• Raspberry Pi (model B) + Pi Cam + PIR (rehoused in a box from Maplins, waterproofed with silicon glue)
• PiFaceDigitalIO for the relay
• 24VAC solenoid water valve + AC/AC adaptor
• Standard garden sprinkler connected to mains water via the solenoid
• Some wire and some hosepipe

He explained: “The solenoid is switched via the PiFace relay in response to a PIR signal, controlled via about 40 lines of pretty amateurish Python, the main feature being use of the PiCam Python library which has a circular stream buffer feature for the video, allowing capture of pre-event footage.”

Read more.

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