Building a Smarter Kitty Litter Tray with @AdafruitIO
Andy Bradford‘s cat, Ellie, is hard to pick up and place on a scale. Unfortunately, this means that Ellie is weighed only once a year at the vet. He “wanted to build something that would fit into her life to track her weight automatically, without any intervention”. Andy set about modifying the litter box by building a wooden platform with load cells to read the cat’s weight.
An Adafruit ESP8266 breakout reads the value of the load cells and publishes it to Adafruit.io, our free IoT Platform. An Adafruit IO dashboard is used to visually show the delta between Ellie’s weight and her poop’s weight:
Finally, “once the data is in Adafruit IO, I use the Mosquitto broker to bring that data into my Home Assistant instance. This allows me to create an automation that sends me a push notification so I know there’s a litter to clean, as well as to turn on the air purifier for a while to handle any smells.”
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