[Estefannie] is a proud cat owner, but one of her cats has a bad habit of eating plastic. That means she has to watch that cat’s stool, but with two cats in the house, it’s hard to know who did what. So, she created an artificial intelligence system to log her cat’s bathroom visits and give her peace of mind.
It’s not the most glamorous project – [Estefannie] notes that she’s taken over 50,000 photos of her cats using the litter box to train Microsoft Azure’s Custom Vision model. But after some work, he could easily identify which cat was using the litter box when he received 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 gather the results, paired with a front-end website for easy data display. This way, anyone on [Estefannie’s] The 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 hacking litter box DRMs.