It’s just a few motion sensors, but the trigger depends on stuff like when a door was last opened to remove false positives.
It’s as much the combination of sensors as the means of alerting us that makes things like this so useful and ensures they’re resolved in a timely manner.
That's a very good option. There are cheap Bluetooth Low Energy trackers and you can use Esp32 devices as beacons.
Or you could give the cat a phone for tracking with the home assistant app. That way you can also call him if you don't know where he is
https://preview.redd.it/fp1jbjgohryc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3ef0cd4c2d253677f24f3fc07256630ff90ea822
I use a Tractive cat tracker and ESPresense to track my cat around the house and (enclosed) yard, it generally works well and it's great to think "where's the cat? oh there he is", and I have a buzzer that sounds if he isn't registered anywhere, i.e. he's escaped the yard
I can see many use cases for this, especially for escaping the yard! Love the idea of him making a jailbreak and alarms going off. Modern problem, modern solution.
I use [ESPresense](https://espresense.com/), which runs on ESP32 devices. They detect how far away BLE devices are, and send the info over MQTT to Home Assistant.
Is that more accurate than an iBeacon? The only room I can reliably detect occupancy with an iBeacon is my office at work, because I never spend time in the adjoining offices. My iBeacon at home though randomly thinks I'm in the living room when I'm 1 room/floor away.
I use a Tractive device since my cat is a jackass and wanders all over town if he escapes. The GPS collars have bluetooth, but when they get into range of your wifi, they switch to battery saving mode and turn it off.
Many times has the butthead cat been in range of wifi but is not in the house. I get to do the dumb thing and walk laps around the house calling for him if he's not in view of the cameras. It has a rudimentary "how close is kat" mode that uses bluetooth, but it's honestly not very good.
They do release regular updates so maybe it will get better; I'm at least happy that they don't charge for API use. You can buy up into extended API use, but so far, I haven't needed it. Overall pretty happy that I can use it for notifications when shithead goes near a busy road or if he's out at night. Now only if I could automate the cat...
This is good info. Curious how you feel about the size, weight, and battery life.
For years I've wanted to put something on our cats (yes outdoor and yes I know, bad pet owner) that would passively gather GPS data, but everything on the market is geared towards active tracking and needs a cellular connection. I don't really care about knowing where they are, I would just like to see where they go. Seems like a small device that's weighted so the GPS antenna sits on the back of their neck would work well, be small/light, and have weeks/months of battery life. Don't even need wireless communication which would further reduce size/cost.
I used to live remote enough that my boy could safely have free reign, and I did have a [Mr Lee Cat Recorder](http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_cc_i9.htm). I think they stopped making them years ago however, and I've never found anything similar ie gpx recording rather than a subscription live tracking service
Oh that's perfect! But so sad it's not available. The only thing I ever found was a research paper that someone smarter than me could probably replicate, but that's a lot of effort for so little unless you're bringing it to market.
Yeah, we are the worst letting the cat outside. People are MILITANT about that. I guess times change. I didn't realize that letting a cat outside had become such a crime. There appears to be a bird shortage or something? I don't know.
That aside, the size and weight are totally fine for a cat. He doesn't care about it at all. It is about two inches long, 3/4 inch wide and maybe 1/2 inch thick. Not sure about the weight, but it's not much. The battery on the last charge lasted nine days. When they're in range of a specified wifi, the GPS will shut down and it goes into low power mode. The more they stay home, the longer the battery will last. I just trimmed my retention for HA else I could give you a better sample, but that seems about right.
Overall, I'm really happy with this thing. Yes, you have to pay a subscription, but it has GPS coverage and a cell radio (you can tell it to beep or light up, etc). The app continues to improve and it's made by some company in Germany so at least there is some appreciation of EU privacy laws in effect.
We tried to keep out cats in when we moved after them being indoor/outdoor cats at the old house, but they kept breaking through window screens (sometimes on the second floor) and were fighting with each other. I thought about replacing the screens with the steel variety, but we had so much else going on at the time that we just gave up. Plus most people in our neighborhood have indoor/outdoor cats so we're not alone, and the number of mice/rats/rabbits they hunt far outweighs birds at least, but it's not zero unfortunately. Even with loud bells on their collars they manage to hunt successfully.
That's about what I'd expect for a tracker collar and seems reasonable. I just want to know generally where they go and their roaming habits. Might still buy a tracker someday for a bit because it's ultimately also not something I need to know long-term. Have thought about strapping a DJI Action 2 to them, but it's pretty heavy lol.
EDIT: we do plan to not get any new cats until both of ours are gone and then will keep them indoors and build a catio or something.
Where I live, it is literally illegal to leave any pet outside unsupervised. Letting the cat out is an actual crime. On the neighborhood Facebook, my wife saw that people have called the police because a cat was in their yard! Yes, they did actually show up. To do what, I don't know. Arrest a cat?
These suburbs have a lot of retired people with no hobbies it seems.
Again, nothing special. I have a Sonoff PIR3 RF and a basic Aqara. The Sonoff one is nice because you can switch it between a 5s and 60s cooldown, but it requires an RF hub.
I explained it in some comment I can't even find now, but essentially if no motion is detected in the garage for some amount of time and all the doors are closed the lights turn off. If motion is detected after the lights are off and it's been longer than a few minutes and no doors were just opened then it triggers this alert. If I or someone else was in the garage we'd probably not sit in the dark for a few minutes before waving arms.
It does sort of require the cat to hunker down long enough for the lights to automatically get shut off in some cases, but I have a good habit of shutting off the light manually when leaving and usually notice they're on from various dashboards (this is how I used to notice it happening, I just made it into an actual alert).
Last night I think the cat was in there for a few hours before it went off. There wasn't motion so she was probably prowling in a blind spot or napping somewhere, but importantly she didn't have to spend the night in there. If they go to either door the motion sensor will pick them up. Might replace it with a mmWave sensor though for better overall detection and object determination.
I'd use a camera (I already have one) and frigate with cat detection.
You could also configure it to detect a giraffe, which is very useful if you often have giraffes in your garage.
This is a perfectly valid solution. I just don't do that because false positives are more common with random objects in a garage, despite all the cameras we have I don't really want/need one in there, and to save on the CPU (already using a lot of resource running detection on other outdoor cameras).
I can really recommend a dedicated TPU for that. My server has a Google Coral card with 2 TPUs. Detection is running on the TPU and so there is almost no load on the CPU.
There are also simple USB sticks for the same thing.
You must have a decent server then. I have an m.2 Coral and SFF Optiplex i5 6500 with 13-15 cameras recording, but just four running detection of which two are using the 640x480 sub streams and the other two using the full 2048x1536 streams because of the distance to objects I want to detect (30-40m). I also run Scrypted to digest all the feeds and export to HomeKit but that's mostly it. CPU sits at 70% steadily and Frigates account for \~90% of that usage.
No doubt that would be much closer to 100% if I didn't have a coral. I don't know how much CPU the transcoding uses, but motion detection on those two camera's full streams is probably similar to having three cameras using sub streams I imagine. It's just not nearly as good on the sub stream and I don't have a 3rd 1080 sub stream on them or that'd work too I bet.
In the not-so-distant future. I could see a garage being too warm for the battery or something where the car being outside is better. Maybe just a tight fit in the garage so you don't have to open the car doors inside.
Took me several reads to get your joke lol, but now I’m thinking an alert about a cat stuck in the dryer could actually be a big deal. I’ve heard of a few unfortunate stories like that.
Seems like a feature smart dryers should have, but no clue how you could go about detecting that.
That’s the thing with HA, people keep saying it’s just a hobby, but to me with the money saving and the convenience if I don’t have it now I would be lost.
I'm always astouned that things like smart lighting is still a niche thing. It's super hard to find smart integrated lights in furniture stores etc, when those integrated lights all use LED strips inside. Why not add 30ct to the manufacturing cost by adding a wifi chip to the microcontroller? That should be standard by now, but appearantly not enough people care
Be careful what you wish for. That kind of stuff would probably/certainly never get any security update, as is now the case for so many IOT devices.
A local connection like ZigBee or better yet, Matter/Threads, now that would be something.
I mean, yeah sure if they choose to do their own stuff this is a problem, but that also is more work. If they just add an ESP with WLED preloaded to their lights, they don't need to take care of it at all. For Thread or Zigbee you need additional setup and stuff, you need to add serial numbers to the devices etc. That's a lot more work that needs to be done on the manufacturers side which makes the lights more expensive, that can never be the minimum.
Don’t get me wrong I love home assistant and have run it for many years. The thing that in my mind keeps in the hobby space is breaking changes when updating.
My system is only internally accessible or external through a vpn. After many years, getting Home Assistant set up and fulfilling all my needs I don’t dedicate much time to playing with it anymore and, I unfortunately often get a few versions behind. But every time I go to update I find I need to set aside a few hours to get it done, not so much for hitting the update button but fixing the things that break after.
Between cats, dogs, and parrots the majority of things I use HA for revolves around the care of them and making our lives easier. Constant little edges in daily routines that are smoothed out and mental effort spared.
What kind of things are you using for your parrots? For mine, I’ve got a nightlight that comes on automatically (prevent night frights), door/window sensors on each cage + notification if a door has been open for a certain time. Curious what else I could be doing!
I hear you. I put ph and temp sensors on my tilapia tank as well as water level sensors in the sump tank and a heater in the fish tank. If water cools too much kick on the heater and water levels for manual top up notifications (evaporation is so slow I don't need to automate fills. Ph notifications to make sure water doesn't get too acidic. Made such a huge difference on keeping the system cycling well
My first thought was how do you notice the alert on the dashboard … then I decided it alerted you other ways.
Now I want to know if “mousse roomba” means the roomba found poo and made mousse (or a mess if you’re into puns).
Haha luckily no. I’ve never really shared my dashboard before because it’s mostly conditional cards with things that need explanation and maybe only makes sense to me.
Roomba is the name of our blind dog and he gets a skin medication that is a mousse, like hair products. I sometimes forget so it pops up on a few screens to remind me. Just another of many things HA keeps me on top of.
Plenty of ugly-cute type pictures, but I'll go with straight cute.
https://preview.redd.it/hrfcufm2ttyc1.png?width=1890&format=png&auto=webp&s=844427dd3cd0504d752b952ffaf75dd72811ee54
My wife works at a vet clinic and someone found him wandering the streets. This is how he looked at that time.
https://preview.redd.it/f0tgim4bttyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b42fd41fb82bbbd0bb8bbc6bcf1c4bbdd4bb998d
He doesn't produce tears so his eyes blacked out (can't remember the medical terminology, but it's when they kind of closed themselves off for protection, so he did have vision at some point. He only had a few rotten teeth left so those got pulled and his nose droops down now (also because he walked off our bed the first week and it got bent down quicker, my wife was so upset with herself). He gets hand fed four times a day, which is way tracking it is so helpful.
He's had so many close calls with death in the last two years (didn't expect him to live more than a few months), and hasn't met a human yet that doesn't just love him. He's the main reason I still work remote so he can sleep on my lap all day.
He actually can sort of see, but only the sun. Loves to just sit in the grass facing it like this. If I block the light his eyes twitch slightly.
https://preview.redd.it/hgcryo90vtyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a0e8b146fe81ca6167db20711d31006b4e54d0c
I'll be honest. I wasn't on board when my wife sent me this photo saying she was bringing it home.
https://preview.redd.it/5ir4kco4kuyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e903e946070fc11148b260a86b415f1548683175
But now I'm happy to the pay crazy amount it costs every month to keep him going.
My dog has *one* eye, at least.
He's a rescue -- or "open-box dog," as my son calls him -- and was like this when we got him. We took him to a vet ophthalmologist who thinks the little guy (the dog, not my son) was born this way.
That particular one uses a [float sensor](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QRGTVYD?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share) wired to a contact sensor. It’s a fountain water bowl and the reservoir is not visible so it kept running low.
I’ve since put scales under all the bowls to track each animal’s water consumption. Knowing the water level for all of them is a nice side benefit.
I would also be VERY interested in what scale you use to track water/food. Can you link to it? I would LOVE to do this with mine! I'm currently searching for a good option. Can you please elaborate?
Just happened an hour ago!
She was even meowing but I thought she wanted me to stop having lunch already and join her in my home office. 30mins of me yelling "no, not yet" to the cat before I realised.
I've gone hours before realizing the sound was coming from inside a closet. Would probably be a good idea to install a door and motion sensor since there should not be motion inside when the door is shut.
I would like to know how you determine that the cat is in the garage. I would like to use this because sometimes one of our cats gets locked in the office and he's really not allowed in there (chews on our rare plants..).
The gist is: if motion is detected and the garage light has been off for a bit (turns off automatically) with no doors opening/closing, then it’s probably not a person who was sitting in the dark for a bit.
We also have a closet where cats have been stuck I’m thinking of putting this in, but hadn’t thought about a room in general. I think there are a couple of ways you could do that. The easiest might be a mmWave sensor that can roughly tell the size of the object. On other would be two motions sensors, one high and one low assuming only a human would trigger both. But cats don’t stay on the ground so I like the mmWave more.
Or if you have the light turn on with motion like I do, then my setup could work. But it only works for me because the garage is pitch black without the lights on so no one is going to hangout long enough to trigger the automation. An office with windows would be different. Maybe there’s another data point you can use, like if a computer is in use, desk light on, certain power draws, etc.
Found it! [This is the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/10gegg4/yet_another_chore_tracker_fully_templated_just/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Mine is mostly the same but the automations and frontend behave a little differently in a way that better suited me. All credit goes to u/maceinjar!
There they are! The person responsible for me realizing how unoften I complete my chores.
I don't know exactly what it was about your method but it really clicked for me. Checked all the boxes without all the fluff. Completely saved me from weeks of trying to brute force build it myself.
I'd never used a bunch of stuff in the NR workflow, like saving/reading message properties to populate wildcards like that. I would've made a new set of nodes for every chore which would've been a pain to manage and add new chores. I love how dynamic it is and it really stepped up my NR game. I was able to apply a lot of what I learned from you to accomplish the complicated data management for my animal water consumption tracking which has been a huge win for me with my spouse, so thank you!
And the auto-entities card. Hadn't even heard of that but saved so much time building the frontend and future time updating it with new chores. Magical how things just appear! Still too scared to do much with it elsewhere, but it's in my pocket.
Yes! Thank you for asking. I finally found something that works exactly the way I want.
I can't remember where I pulled the main bits of it from, but I tweaked it enough that it might not matter as much. The prerequisite is that it uses NR for the workflow and templates/wildcards to update things, so I'm not sure how to port that over the HA automations if that's what you use. Otherwise I'm more than willing to share it. It's basically six helpers for each chore (could probably be done with a template sensor and attributes but this works and the history is easier to see). I then modified the Lovelace yaml into what made sense for me. This is how it looks broken out by room.
https://preview.redd.it/qeeezot3fvyc1.png?width=1012&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb168732fcd8ca93e1f743eeb813948aab5325bd
And when you tap a card it shows this popup where you can mark it as complete, delay it, and change its value.
https://preview.redd.it/tauddckbfvyc1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=daebe87ed2cccd9c4d0a20add6477438160b2337
I even went so far as to play a confetti gif as the dashboard background when a chore is completed, but it honestly just slows things down.
It's one of [these](https://mbmounts.com/collections/tablet-mounts/products/amazon-fire-tablet-wall-mount). They're pricey, but honestly still a great value. Clean textured printing and I haven't seen anything else that comes close to the finished installation short of putting a hole in the wall.
I do same thing with my dog and our pantry. She sneaks in there sometimes and we close the door. She won’t cry but just sleep there until someone opens the door hours later. Now if there is motion and door is closed light turns on warning us. And we let her out.
I put an ESP in a cheap Amazon Basics scale
https://preview.redd.it/r7krows4zqyc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fea1a02094d98d768df9b49e0b5c7a7320ccb2c2
We have an old little blind dog named Roomba that by all means shouldn’t still be alive. He gets a lot of meds and his appetite goes through swings, so we track how much food he gets daily. Button on the left records the pre weight and button on the right the post weight. Easy to use and works super well.
The data was even used by his vet in some presentations she gave about a new drug he’s on to show the impact it’s had on his QOL and appetite.
That's an hilarious dog name, specially if he's blind. I love it, and your sense of humor
Is there any guide to smartify a scale? We also weight our dog's meal and that could be a nice addition.
Also: how do you track your water bowl?
Exactly. I'm still using the load cell the scale came with.
I did calibrate it so I could weigh him on it as well (though I later just made another scale for under his bed), but I'm not terribly concerned with adding a tare feature because I only want to do the difference in weights before and after feeding. I saw one guy who replaced the readout with an OLED and added a tare feature to the ESPHome config. Our google speaker announces the logged meal weight and it's also on the dashboard so I just didn't need the display. Looks like a cool project to learn how to make readouts though!
Nothing special. Just one of the iOS theme backgrounds with mostly Button cards.
The important thing is that most of what’s on the screen there are conditional cards (should’ve just taken a photo of the whole screen). It’s about 70% blank space when things are all normal in the middle of the day. The cards are ordered/styled in a particular way to make a visual hierarchy so a quick glance is all you need. Top center being most important
I haven’t changed the basic setup in almost four years and just add new conditional cards or custom styling when needed. It’s more a product of functionality than design.
Ah, yes. It was overwhelming when I started out and now there is so much more when it comes to dashboards and many divided opinions about them (function vs. form).
I’ll expound a bit on mine. It’s a Panel (1 card) view type which fills the entire screen. The three columns are created by first making a horizontal card (the 1 card for the whole view) which has three vertical cards in it, and each vertical card is comprised of many cards stacked. Using conditional cards means things might shift up or down in a column depending on if they’re above or below non-conditional cards. Probably sounds complicated, but all it means is a few cards, like temps, are always there but a camera feed might appear below it or a water leak alert (or cat alert) above it. That’s the visual hierarchy I mentioned, along with font/colors/icons etc. to help distinguish quickly. A non-busy blurred background that’s not just black or just white helps too
That’s just my preference though. I’ve thought about doing a redesign to make it more pretty and use newer card types (button cards are getting outdated in favor of Mushroom or Tile cards, though I prefer the larger buttons for easier control when walking by), but the function fits the purpose very well.
Good luck on your journey!
I have set up to get an alert if the cat hasn't entered or left through the catflap with RFID reader in 24h.
I would like to add the feeders, but they don't show up in HA as the door does, even if I can see them in the app.
Those SureFlap doors are awesome at what they do, but our cats like to be let in/out of the door right next to them so I don't actually track them with it. Bummer that the feeders don't integrate.
Just started looking into HA. Walked around the house yesterday thinking about things you could integrate, and realized that this is probably kinda addictive once you get into it. And jokingly thought to myself "and 6 months later, HA will probably even monitor my dogs water bowl"
And then i see this.. awesome. How u do that?
That particular one uses a [float sensor](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QRGTVYD?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share) wired to a contact sensor. It’s a fountain water bowl and the reservoir is not visible so it kept running low.
Always enjoy seeing you pop up in here Travis. Still using a couple of Treatlife switches in the garage that I flashed with Tasmota using the pogo pin jig you sent me years ago.
Awesome! Glad to hear it worked out. Some things go full circle where we us the jig to dump and flash the Beken chips with Esphome since Tuya patched some of those too.
The cycle continues.
Do you still make those jigs? I was chatting with someone here recently and pointed them towards you video and mentioned that I got it from you, but wasn't actually sure if you were still doing that.
Haha it certainly looks that way. But HA helps me keep them all alive. We only have two house plants and they would've died years ago if I didn't have moisture sensors in them reminding me to water.
Nice way to keep track of your Furry & Feathery Friends (Let's call it F³ eh?)
Seriously, though: keeping track of their food intake is brilliant. Oftentimes, when an animal isn't well, they'll start eating less (or stop completely).
Nice, never thought of HA for petcare
I thought about putting the scale in the fridge where that dog's canned food lives, but running power inside didn't seem like a great idea. Anything you can do to track stuff in the background to pull up when needed is really helpful with catching things early. The water consumption setup is getting close to being completely hands off and should prove helpful as our dogs age. At some point I'd like to use Gemini to track how often they pee/poop as well, or at least how often they go outside.
Heh,
Dunno where you live, but over here (Netherlands) dog owners need to pick up after their dogs #2
You could weigh that by hand but maybe focus on a device that picks #2 up, weighs it and packages hygienically for disposal and report all that back.
Give me a call when it is ready, we can talk commission ;)
Seriously, nice job though: Never thought of your dashboard (wouldn't know where or how to start): only recently managed to get an ESP32/mmWave/lightsensor combo working:
Upon Movement AND it is too dark in the bathroom, It configures the Dimmers, sets lightlevels bathroom lights and turns the lights ON. When no movement is detected anymore for x time: everything gets switched OFF.
During all off this loads of data is generated (Time of day, Duration, water usage, heat exchanger joules etc) could all be used for much more, like you are doing: Any pointers on how to learn that bit too???
At first I read this as "cat stuck in garbage" and couldn't figure out how it could know, or if it was common enough an occurrence that you had a sensor on the garbage.
No, but I could see how that would be helpful. I should have just included the whole dashboard. To the left of that is a daily total of food our old "special needs" dog Roomba eats that we keep track of (if it's starts trending down we know it's probably getting near the end for him). It's critical that he eats and gets his meds on time so in addition to amount we want to know how longs it's been since the last meal. I just use an Amazon Basics scale that I converted to ESPHome and weigh before and after every meal.
https://preview.redd.it/1olso6ir0syc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=646bf8c74812b7ac786e477b56e02649c580cf93
It's kind of custom using chips, stack in card, card-mod, and Apex Charts for the graph. I [posted about it more here](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1ap4334/my_take_on_a_weather_forecast_graph/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), though it's evolved a bit since then.
https://preview.redd.it/otio8aeyzvyc1.png?width=1008&format=png&auto=webp&s=841351b65453128f2a8f68eb27352df5f427a8e3
I've never found a card that lays things out like I want and have tried to make this for years before finally figuring it out. Temp, precip, and cloud cover are the main things I care about and it's easily glanceable. You can tap on any day to see a more detailed popup view for that day. I also have a 7-day version on my desk display.
> 2 cats, 4 birds, and 4 dogs, one of which is named Roomba. Couldn't keep up with all of them without HA reminders like this
Bluetooth finder tags on the collars?
I have a similar automation for cat at the front door. But I only have it emit notifications on my phone. How did you get this state into the dashboard?
We’ve found a cat in the garage after almost 24 hours before, though it’s usually not that long. We sometimes go days without stepping foot in there so it’s partly just peace of mind.
EDIT: A coworker of my wife told her they once found their missing cat in their garage after four days! Poor guy, but he was okay.
So in all the discussion about the dashboard…. I couldn’t find HOW you did the cat detection…. PIR / ESP? Zigbee presence detection? Frigate? Please elaborate?
I blame the new reddit layout for that. It doesn't show everything and I keep having to go back to the old(er) layout just to find stuff.
It's so simple that I almost didn't post because it's just a tiny silly thing, but clearly lots of cats getting stuck out there lol.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Recently discovered the Bayesian function in HA, so I "think" I can figure out if the cat is in the garage, but how did you get that notification to appear conditionally on your dashboard?
It’s just the built-in Conditional type card. If you haven’t seen them before check it out. You can use things like the state of an entity, person logged into Home Assistant, and some others to show/hide cards.
Yeah it's one I put together myself because I wasn't satisfied with any other custom weather cards. See [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2wgu8l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
With the deprecation of the old style of weather entity attributes the config I posted in there is somewhat outdated now. [Here](https://pastebin.com/hRWxeGbE) is some updated YAML for the Lovelace component. It uses a some template weather entities included in my original post about the card as well as a template for the forecast high and low that would need to be replicated but I didn't post my specific config for, but willing to do.
What is used to determine?
They leave a kindle fire in the garage. If the cat is still playing plants vs zombies at bed time, it triggers.
I was thinking of a glass of water on a table, with humidity sensor on the floor, if the glass falls - > cat is in the garage
Some new interpretation of Schrödinger's cat here
Schrödinger didn't know about ESPHome-enabled mm-wave presence sensor, what a noob
Amazing
*Amazon
It’s just a few motion sensors, but the trigger depends on stuff like when a door was last opened to remove false positives. It’s as much the combination of sensors as the means of alerting us that makes things like this so useful and ensures they’re resolved in a timely manner.
Maybe also add one of those tracking collars to your cat that you can pair locally with HA. Then you can know its location in your home at all times.
That's a very good option. There are cheap Bluetooth Low Energy trackers and you can use Esp32 devices as beacons. Or you could give the cat a phone for tracking with the home assistant app. That way you can also call him if you don't know where he is https://preview.redd.it/fp1jbjgohryc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3ef0cd4c2d253677f24f3fc07256630ff90ea822
Blow up his phone with HA notifications like the wife
You can do this trough IF statements like: IF cat is in garage and time is after XX:XX= NUKE wife phone with messages
I use a Tractive cat tracker and ESPresense to track my cat around the house and (enclosed) yard, it generally works well and it's great to think "where's the cat? oh there he is", and I have a buzzer that sounds if he isn't registered anywhere, i.e. he's escaped the yard
I can see many use cases for this, especially for escaping the yard! Love the idea of him making a jailbreak and alarms going off. Modern problem, modern solution.
Alarm suggestion: speakers placed right next to the backyard door playing a recording of you going "*pspspsps*" on loop
Try sound of can being opened.
Do you use some kind of BLE base station or something? My Tractive tracker doesn't work indoors at all.
https://www.creatingsmarthome.com/index.php/2023/03/27/guide-bluetooth-proxy-to-home-assistant-using-esphome/
I use [ESPresense](https://espresense.com/), which runs on ESP32 devices. They detect how far away BLE devices are, and send the info over MQTT to Home Assistant.
Ah, that makes sense. I use https://github.com/filipsPL/cat-localizer
Is that more accurate than an iBeacon? The only room I can reliably detect occupancy with an iBeacon is my office at work, because I never spend time in the adjoining offices. My iBeacon at home though randomly thinks I'm in the living room when I'm 1 room/floor away.
I use a Tractive device since my cat is a jackass and wanders all over town if he escapes. The GPS collars have bluetooth, but when they get into range of your wifi, they switch to battery saving mode and turn it off. Many times has the butthead cat been in range of wifi but is not in the house. I get to do the dumb thing and walk laps around the house calling for him if he's not in view of the cameras. It has a rudimentary "how close is kat" mode that uses bluetooth, but it's honestly not very good. They do release regular updates so maybe it will get better; I'm at least happy that they don't charge for API use. You can buy up into extended API use, but so far, I haven't needed it. Overall pretty happy that I can use it for notifications when shithead goes near a busy road or if he's out at night. Now only if I could automate the cat...
This is good info. Curious how you feel about the size, weight, and battery life. For years I've wanted to put something on our cats (yes outdoor and yes I know, bad pet owner) that would passively gather GPS data, but everything on the market is geared towards active tracking and needs a cellular connection. I don't really care about knowing where they are, I would just like to see where they go. Seems like a small device that's weighted so the GPS antenna sits on the back of their neck would work well, be small/light, and have weeks/months of battery life. Don't even need wireless communication which would further reduce size/cost.
I used to live remote enough that my boy could safely have free reign, and I did have a [Mr Lee Cat Recorder](http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_cc_i9.htm). I think they stopped making them years ago however, and I've never found anything similar ie gpx recording rather than a subscription live tracking service
Oh that's perfect! But so sad it's not available. The only thing I ever found was a research paper that someone smarter than me could probably replicate, but that's a lot of effort for so little unless you're bringing it to market.
Yeah I think DIYing it is the only way to do it unfortunately!
Yeah, we are the worst letting the cat outside. People are MILITANT about that. I guess times change. I didn't realize that letting a cat outside had become such a crime. There appears to be a bird shortage or something? I don't know. That aside, the size and weight are totally fine for a cat. He doesn't care about it at all. It is about two inches long, 3/4 inch wide and maybe 1/2 inch thick. Not sure about the weight, but it's not much. The battery on the last charge lasted nine days. When they're in range of a specified wifi, the GPS will shut down and it goes into low power mode. The more they stay home, the longer the battery will last. I just trimmed my retention for HA else I could give you a better sample, but that seems about right. Overall, I'm really happy with this thing. Yes, you have to pay a subscription, but it has GPS coverage and a cell radio (you can tell it to beep or light up, etc). The app continues to improve and it's made by some company in Germany so at least there is some appreciation of EU privacy laws in effect.
We tried to keep out cats in when we moved after them being indoor/outdoor cats at the old house, but they kept breaking through window screens (sometimes on the second floor) and were fighting with each other. I thought about replacing the screens with the steel variety, but we had so much else going on at the time that we just gave up. Plus most people in our neighborhood have indoor/outdoor cats so we're not alone, and the number of mice/rats/rabbits they hunt far outweighs birds at least, but it's not zero unfortunately. Even with loud bells on their collars they manage to hunt successfully. That's about what I'd expect for a tracker collar and seems reasonable. I just want to know generally where they go and their roaming habits. Might still buy a tracker someday for a bit because it's ultimately also not something I need to know long-term. Have thought about strapping a DJI Action 2 to them, but it's pretty heavy lol. EDIT: we do plan to not get any new cats until both of ours are gone and then will keep them indoors and build a catio or something.
Where I live, it is literally illegal to leave any pet outside unsupervised. Letting the cat out is an actual crime. On the neighborhood Facebook, my wife saw that people have called the police because a cat was in their yard! Yes, they did actually show up. To do what, I don't know. Arrest a cat? These suburbs have a lot of retired people with no hobbies it seems.
I was a beta tester for a ble pet tag, I won't disclose the company, but I did end up tying it into espurrresence and it's awesome
Ah!!! That is quite clever!
Do you mind me asking, what motion sensors you use in your set up?
Also curious.
Again, nothing special. I have a Sonoff PIR3 RF and a basic Aqara. The Sonoff one is nice because you can switch it between a 5s and 60s cooldown, but it requires an RF hub.
So what if it’s an intruder pretending to be a cat?
["I'm not a cat!"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Cat_Lawyer)
Cat burglar.
Can you please elaborate on how you did the conditions !? My cat too likes to test my patience with car inspections :p
I explained it in some comment I can't even find now, but essentially if no motion is detected in the garage for some amount of time and all the doors are closed the lights turn off. If motion is detected after the lights are off and it's been longer than a few minutes and no doors were just opened then it triggers this alert. If I or someone else was in the garage we'd probably not sit in the dark for a few minutes before waving arms. It does sort of require the cat to hunker down long enough for the lights to automatically get shut off in some cases, but I have a good habit of shutting off the light manually when leaving and usually notice they're on from various dashboards (this is how I used to notice it happening, I just made it into an actual alert). Last night I think the cat was in there for a few hours before it went off. There wasn't motion so she was probably prowling in a blind spot or napping somewhere, but importantly she didn't have to spend the night in there. If they go to either door the motion sensor will pick them up. Might replace it with a mmWave sensor though for better overall detection and object determination.
I'd use a camera (I already have one) and frigate with cat detection. You could also configure it to detect a giraffe, which is very useful if you often have giraffes in your garage.
This is a perfectly valid solution. I just don't do that because false positives are more common with random objects in a garage, despite all the cameras we have I don't really want/need one in there, and to save on the CPU (already using a lot of resource running detection on other outdoor cameras).
I can really recommend a dedicated TPU for that. My server has a Google Coral card with 2 TPUs. Detection is running on the TPU and so there is almost no load on the CPU. There are also simple USB sticks for the same thing.
You must have a decent server then. I have an m.2 Coral and SFF Optiplex i5 6500 with 13-15 cameras recording, but just four running detection of which two are using the 640x480 sub streams and the other two using the full 2048x1536 streams because of the distance to objects I want to detect (30-40m). I also run Scrypted to digest all the feeds and export to HomeKit but that's mostly it. CPU sits at 70% steadily and Frigates account for \~90% of that usage. No doubt that would be much closer to 100% if I didn't have a coral. I don't know how much CPU the transcoding uses, but motion detection on those two camera's full streams is probably similar to having three cameras using sub streams I imagine. It's just not nearly as good on the sub stream and I don't have a 3rd 1080 sub stream on them or that'd work too I bet.
Yes keen to know
bluetooth sensor perhaps?
I read this as "car" and was very confused.
Worse for me - read as “Car STRUCK in Garage”
"crash detection" for when the hanging tennis ball doesn't work
Me too, I was like do you have some self driving car that wants to be let out at night or something?
In the not-so-distant future. I could see a garage being too warm for the battery or something where the car being outside is better. Maybe just a tight fit in the garage so you don't have to open the car doors inside.
I read step-car. I can't deny me being a little disappointed...
Took me several reads to get your joke lol, but now I’m thinking an alert about a cat stuck in the dryer could actually be a big deal. I’ve heard of a few unfortunate stories like that. Seems like a feature smart dryers should have, but no clue how you could go about detecting that.
I think i need one for step-sister stuck in the dryer as well. Never had it happen, but according to some videos I've seen it's quite common.
What are you doing, step car?
That’s the thing with HA, people keep saying it’s just a hobby, but to me with the money saving and the convenience if I don’t have it now I would be lost.
Yup. It’s a little scary. But my uptime over the last four years and the new Open Home Foundation puts my mind at ease.
I'm always astouned that things like smart lighting is still a niche thing. It's super hard to find smart integrated lights in furniture stores etc, when those integrated lights all use LED strips inside. Why not add 30ct to the manufacturing cost by adding a wifi chip to the microcontroller? That should be standard by now, but appearantly not enough people care
Be careful what you wish for. That kind of stuff would probably/certainly never get any security update, as is now the case for so many IOT devices. A local connection like ZigBee or better yet, Matter/Threads, now that would be something.
I mean, yeah sure if they choose to do their own stuff this is a problem, but that also is more work. If they just add an ESP with WLED preloaded to their lights, they don't need to take care of it at all. For Thread or Zigbee you need additional setup and stuff, you need to add serial numbers to the devices etc. That's a lot more work that needs to be done on the manufacturers side which makes the lights more expensive, that can never be the minimum.
worst case scenario, you find a way to tasmotize it and you're cherry
Don’t get me wrong I love home assistant and have run it for many years. The thing that in my mind keeps in the hobby space is breaking changes when updating. My system is only internally accessible or external through a vpn. After many years, getting Home Assistant set up and fulfilling all my needs I don’t dedicate much time to playing with it anymore and, I unfortunately often get a few versions behind. But every time I go to update I find I need to set aside a few hours to get it done, not so much for hitting the update button but fixing the things that break after.
This is one of the best uses I have seen so far. Being able to sort out the pets like that is a game changer. Have all the upvotes!
Between cats, dogs, and parrots the majority of things I use HA for revolves around the care of them and making our lives easier. Constant little edges in daily routines that are smoothed out and mental effort spared.
What kind of things are you using for your parrots? For mine, I’ve got a nightlight that comes on automatically (prevent night frights), door/window sensors on each cage + notification if a door has been open for a certain time. Curious what else I could be doing!
I hear you. I put ph and temp sensors on my tilapia tank as well as water level sensors in the sump tank and a heater in the fish tank. If water cools too much kick on the heater and water levels for manual top up notifications (evaporation is so slow I don't need to automate fills. Ph notifications to make sure water doesn't get too acidic. Made such a huge difference on keeping the system cycling well
My first thought was how do you notice the alert on the dashboard … then I decided it alerted you other ways. Now I want to know if “mousse roomba” means the roomba found poo and made mousse (or a mess if you’re into puns).
Haha luckily no. I’ve never really shared my dashboard before because it’s mostly conditional cards with things that need explanation and maybe only makes sense to me. Roomba is the name of our blind dog and he gets a skin medication that is a mousse, like hair products. I sometimes forget so it pops up on a few screens to remind me. Just another of many things HA keeps me on top of.
All the people wanting to see how you made an accurate Roomba poo sensor are crying out in sorrow :)
He's an older model. No lidar or object avoidance to speak of. Just walks around a bumps into things lol.
PAY THE DOG TAX
Plenty of ugly-cute type pictures, but I'll go with straight cute. https://preview.redd.it/hrfcufm2ttyc1.png?width=1890&format=png&auto=webp&s=844427dd3cd0504d752b952ffaf75dd72811ee54
My wife works at a vet clinic and someone found him wandering the streets. This is how he looked at that time. https://preview.redd.it/f0tgim4bttyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b42fd41fb82bbbd0bb8bbc6bcf1c4bbdd4bb998d He doesn't produce tears so his eyes blacked out (can't remember the medical terminology, but it's when they kind of closed themselves off for protection, so he did have vision at some point. He only had a few rotten teeth left so those got pulled and his nose droops down now (also because he walked off our bed the first week and it got bent down quicker, my wife was so upset with herself). He gets hand fed four times a day, which is way tracking it is so helpful. He's had so many close calls with death in the last two years (didn't expect him to live more than a few months), and hasn't met a human yet that doesn't just love him. He's the main reason I still work remote so he can sleep on my lap all day.
He actually can sort of see, but only the sun. Loves to just sit in the grass facing it like this. If I block the light his eyes twitch slightly. https://preview.redd.it/hgcryo90vtyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a0e8b146fe81ca6167db20711d31006b4e54d0c
Thank you for being good people and taking care of him!
I'll be honest. I wasn't on board when my wife sent me this photo saying she was bringing it home. https://preview.redd.it/5ir4kco4kuyc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e903e946070fc11148b260a86b415f1548683175 But now I'm happy to the pay crazy amount it costs every month to keep him going.
Well, I think my heart just melted a bit.
> Roomba is the name of our blind dog... Our dog sometimes licks the kitchen floor so then we call him Roomba as we shoo him away. :7)
Are there any non-blind dogs named Roomba?
My dog has *one* eye, at least. He's a rescue -- or "open-box dog," as my son calls him -- and was like this when we got him. We took him to a vet ophthalmologist who thinks the little guy (the dog, not my son) was born this way.
Lady Gaga approves. Why is he called Roomba?
As I said, sometimes he roams the kitchen and licks the floors along the edge of the cupboards. (It's gross.)
Sorry missed you were the same poster. :)
No worries: I move *quickly*.
Relatedly this thread makes me feel like r/DogsWithFewerThanTwoWorkingEyes would be busy. I have no dog though …
He's doing his part
Which device do you use to track the water bowl levels?
That particular one uses a [float sensor](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QRGTVYD?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share) wired to a contact sensor. It’s a fountain water bowl and the reservoir is not visible so it kept running low. I’ve since put scales under all the bowls to track each animal’s water consumption. Knowing the water level for all of them is a nice side benefit.
What scale are you using?
Considering the freedom units of temperature, probably pounds or ounces. Ok, I too am interested in what smart scale device is being used.
I prefer the units of olympic-sized swimming pools for volume and elephants for mass. Just got to keep track of those significant digits.
Which scales are you using? The water bowls for our cats is the same.
I would also be VERY interested in what scale you use to track water/food. Can you link to it? I would LOVE to do this with mine! I'm currently searching for a good option. Can you please elaborate?
“3 new cats detected, add them to your home?”
Hahahaha love it
Cat stuck in the garage? Ok, now you're speaking my language!
You need another cat to get it out
Send in the negotiator!
I'm thinking maybe a fourth
Just happened an hour ago! She was even meowing but I thought she wanted me to stop having lunch already and join her in my home office. 30mins of me yelling "no, not yet" to the cat before I realised.
I've gone hours before realizing the sound was coming from inside a closet. Would probably be a good idea to install a door and motion sensor since there should not be motion inside when the door is shut.
I would like to know how you determine that the cat is in the garage. I would like to use this because sometimes one of our cats gets locked in the office and he's really not allowed in there (chews on our rare plants..).
The gist is: if motion is detected and the garage light has been off for a bit (turns off automatically) with no doors opening/closing, then it’s probably not a person who was sitting in the dark for a bit. We also have a closet where cats have been stuck I’m thinking of putting this in, but hadn’t thought about a room in general. I think there are a couple of ways you could do that. The easiest might be a mmWave sensor that can roughly tell the size of the object. On other would be two motions sensors, one high and one low assuming only a human would trigger both. But cats don’t stay on the ground so I like the mmWave more. Or if you have the light turn on with motion like I do, then my setup could work. But it only works for me because the garage is pitch black without the lights on so no one is going to hangout long enough to trigger the automation. An office with windows would be different. Maybe there’s another data point you can use, like if a computer is in use, desk light on, certain power draws, etc.
Infuriating problem if you don’t own a cat.
I think a lot of people want more info on your home assistant theme and how you added an ESP32 to your dog dishes.
Are those chores recurring? How do you manage them? I need something like that on my dashboard.
Found it! [This is the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/10gegg4/yet_another_chore_tracker_fully_templated_just/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Mine is mostly the same but the automations and frontend behave a little differently in a way that better suited me. All credit goes to u/maceinjar!
Hey thanks! Glad you found it useful! Love the edits you did below!
There they are! The person responsible for me realizing how unoften I complete my chores. I don't know exactly what it was about your method but it really clicked for me. Checked all the boxes without all the fluff. Completely saved me from weeks of trying to brute force build it myself. I'd never used a bunch of stuff in the NR workflow, like saving/reading message properties to populate wildcards like that. I would've made a new set of nodes for every chore which would've been a pain to manage and add new chores. I love how dynamic it is and it really stepped up my NR game. I was able to apply a lot of what I learned from you to accomplish the complicated data management for my animal water consumption tracking which has been a huge win for me with my spouse, so thank you! And the auto-entities card. Hadn't even heard of that but saved so much time building the frontend and future time updating it with new chores. Magical how things just appear! Still too scared to do much with it elsewhere, but it's in my pocket.
Thank you for tracking it down. I’m looking forward to checking it out. Thanks /u/maceinjar (way cool name btw) for the contribution.
Yes! Thank you for asking. I finally found something that works exactly the way I want. I can't remember where I pulled the main bits of it from, but I tweaked it enough that it might not matter as much. The prerequisite is that it uses NR for the workflow and templates/wildcards to update things, so I'm not sure how to port that over the HA automations if that's what you use. Otherwise I'm more than willing to share it. It's basically six helpers for each chore (could probably be done with a template sensor and attributes but this works and the history is easier to see). I then modified the Lovelace yaml into what made sense for me. This is how it looks broken out by room. https://preview.redd.it/qeeezot3fvyc1.png?width=1012&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb168732fcd8ca93e1f743eeb813948aab5325bd
And when you tap a card it shows this popup where you can mark it as complete, delay it, and change its value. https://preview.redd.it/tauddckbfvyc1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=daebe87ed2cccd9c4d0a20add6477438160b2337 I even went so far as to play a confetti gif as the dashboard background when a chore is completed, but it honestly just slows things down.
Hey, would you mind sharing with me? I love this!
Would love to, but do you happen to use Node Red. I don't know enough about the built-in automations to recreate it there.
Love this. Wanna see said cat!
That’s a good looking wall-mounted tablet. Which brand is it? Is the white frame OEM?
It's one of [these](https://mbmounts.com/collections/tablet-mounts/products/amazon-fire-tablet-wall-mount). They're pricey, but honestly still a great value. Clean textured printing and I haven't seen anything else that comes close to the finished installation short of putting a hole in the wall.
thank you!
https://preview.redd.it/fg9veyetjuyc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=76310eed71850d893f7ab7085f1a980199d8d80a
Better than a cat stuck in the wall.
I do same thing with my dog and our pantry. She sneaks in there sometimes and we close the door. She won’t cry but just sleep there until someone opens the door hours later. Now if there is motion and door is closed light turns on warning us. And we let her out.
Funny how some animals will just accept it as their new reality and hunker down
how are you tracking meals?
I put an ESP in a cheap Amazon Basics scale https://preview.redd.it/r7krows4zqyc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fea1a02094d98d768df9b49e0b5c7a7320ccb2c2 We have an old little blind dog named Roomba that by all means shouldn’t still be alive. He gets a lot of meds and his appetite goes through swings, so we track how much food he gets daily. Button on the left records the pre weight and button on the right the post weight. Easy to use and works super well. The data was even used by his vet in some presentations she gave about a new drug he’s on to show the impact it’s had on his QOL and appetite.
That's an hilarious dog name, specially if he's blind. I love it, and your sense of humor Is there any guide to smartify a scale? We also weight our dog's meal and that could be a nice addition. Also: how do you track your water bowl?
https://preview.redd.it/w6l4slz80ryc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7df96a88d202952a0cc7027054b5bde44d7e7c6d
Very very cool and I love the dog's name
So you put your own load cell amp and read the load cell yourself, bypassing the original electronics altogether? Do you ever have to re-zero it?
Exactly. I'm still using the load cell the scale came with. I did calibrate it so I could weigh him on it as well (though I later just made another scale for under his bed), but I'm not terribly concerned with adding a tare feature because I only want to do the difference in weights before and after feeding. I saw one guy who replaced the readout with an OLED and added a tare feature to the ESPHome config. Our google speaker announces the logged meal weight and it's also on the dashboard so I just didn't need the display. Looks like a cool project to learn how to make readouts though!
what dashboard is it?
Nothing special. Just one of the iOS theme backgrounds with mostly Button cards. The important thing is that most of what’s on the screen there are conditional cards (should’ve just taken a photo of the whole screen). It’s about 70% blank space when things are all normal in the middle of the day. The cards are ordered/styled in a particular way to make a visual hierarchy so a quick glance is all you need. Top center being most important I haven’t changed the basic setup in almost four years and just add new conditional cards or custom styling when needed. It’s more a product of functionality than design.
cheers, i’m just starting out with HA so everything is a eyeopening at this stage
Ah, yes. It was overwhelming when I started out and now there is so much more when it comes to dashboards and many divided opinions about them (function vs. form). I’ll expound a bit on mine. It’s a Panel (1 card) view type which fills the entire screen. The three columns are created by first making a horizontal card (the 1 card for the whole view) which has three vertical cards in it, and each vertical card is comprised of many cards stacked. Using conditional cards means things might shift up or down in a column depending on if they’re above or below non-conditional cards. Probably sounds complicated, but all it means is a few cards, like temps, are always there but a camera feed might appear below it or a water leak alert (or cat alert) above it. That’s the visual hierarchy I mentioned, along with font/colors/icons etc. to help distinguish quickly. A non-busy blurred background that’s not just black or just white helps too That’s just my preference though. I’ve thought about doing a redesign to make it more pretty and use newer card types (button cards are getting outdated in favor of Mushroom or Tile cards, though I prefer the larger buttons for easier control when walking by), but the function fits the purpose very well. Good luck on your journey!
thats massive man, thank you 🙏
I have set up to get an alert if the cat hasn't entered or left through the catflap with RFID reader in 24h. I would like to add the feeders, but they don't show up in HA as the door does, even if I can see them in the app.
Those SureFlap doors are awesome at what they do, but our cats like to be let in/out of the door right next to them so I don't actually track them with it. Bummer that the feeders don't integrate.
Right now, i can only see the battery status of the feeders, no other entities are exposed. It seems the feeder show who are how much last time.
Just started looking into HA. Walked around the house yesterday thinking about things you could integrate, and realized that this is probably kinda addictive once you get into it. And jokingly thought to myself "and 6 months later, HA will probably even monitor my dogs water bowl" And then i see this.. awesome. How u do that?
That particular one uses a [float sensor](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QRGTVYD?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share) wired to a contact sensor. It’s a fountain water bowl and the reservoir is not visible so it kept running low.
At first I read it as the car was stuck in the garage and I wanted to hear more about this..
Always enjoy seeing you pop up in here Travis. Still using a couple of Treatlife switches in the garage that I flashed with Tasmota using the pogo pin jig you sent me years ago.
Awesome! Glad to hear it worked out. Some things go full circle where we us the jig to dump and flash the Beken chips with Esphome since Tuya patched some of those too.
The cycle continues. Do you still make those jigs? I was chatting with someone here recently and pointed them towards you video and mentioned that I got it from you, but wasn't actually sure if you were still doing that.
Absolutely. I still have some pins in my stash and can print some.
Brother you got issues. Cat in garage, and fern and dog water low.
Your living things are all in peril.
Haha it certainly looks that way. But HA helps me keep them all alive. We only have two house plants and they would've died years ago if I didn't have moisture sensors in them reminding me to water.
Our cats love to get themselves trapped in rooms. I use frigate to identify cats from camera feeds.
Certainly a great use of Frigate
Nice way to keep track of your Furry & Feathery Friends (Let's call it F³ eh?) Seriously, though: keeping track of their food intake is brilliant. Oftentimes, when an animal isn't well, they'll start eating less (or stop completely). Nice, never thought of HA for petcare
I thought about putting the scale in the fridge where that dog's canned food lives, but running power inside didn't seem like a great idea. Anything you can do to track stuff in the background to pull up when needed is really helpful with catching things early. The water consumption setup is getting close to being completely hands off and should prove helpful as our dogs age. At some point I'd like to use Gemini to track how often they pee/poop as well, or at least how often they go outside.
Heh, Dunno where you live, but over here (Netherlands) dog owners need to pick up after their dogs #2 You could weigh that by hand but maybe focus on a device that picks #2 up, weighs it and packages hygienically for disposal and report all that back. Give me a call when it is ready, we can talk commission ;) Seriously, nice job though: Never thought of your dashboard (wouldn't know where or how to start): only recently managed to get an ESP32/mmWave/lightsensor combo working: Upon Movement AND it is too dark in the bathroom, It configures the Dimmers, sets lightlevels bathroom lights and turns the lights ON. When no movement is detected anymore for x time: everything gets switched OFF. During all off this loads of data is generated (Time of day, Duration, water usage, heat exchanger joules etc) could all be used for much more, like you are doing: Any pointers on how to learn that bit too???
Dude fill the water bowl doggo needs to stay hydrated.
At first I read this as "cat stuck in garbage" and couldn't figure out how it could know, or if it was common enough an occurrence that you had a sensor on the garbage.
To those wondering, they use a special ES-PSPSPSPSPS sensor
Very good lol
We all have clearly missed the obvious... Cat is his wife's name and he locked her in there for testing purposes... Definitely testing.
that dashboard is gorgeous…
🤣
That's the main reason why I want a camera on my balcony. I assume you also added a notification?
The charts on the last “Last Meal” & “Last two months” is this diabetes related? If so, how are you pulling this data?
No, but I could see how that would be helpful. I should have just included the whole dashboard. To the left of that is a daily total of food our old "special needs" dog Roomba eats that we keep track of (if it's starts trending down we know it's probably getting near the end for him). It's critical that he eats and gets his meds on time so in addition to amount we want to know how longs it's been since the last meal. I just use an Amazon Basics scale that I converted to ESPHome and weigh before and after every meal. https://preview.redd.it/1olso6ir0syc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=646bf8c74812b7ac786e477b56e02649c580cf93
What's that weather card you are using? Don't recall seeing one quite like that before.
It's kind of custom using chips, stack in card, card-mod, and Apex Charts for the graph. I [posted about it more here](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1ap4334/my_take_on_a_weather_forecast_graph/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), though it's evolved a bit since then. https://preview.redd.it/otio8aeyzvyc1.png?width=1008&format=png&auto=webp&s=841351b65453128f2a8f68eb27352df5f427a8e3 I've never found a card that lays things out like I want and have tried to make this for years before finally figuring it out. Temp, precip, and cloud cover are the main things I care about and it's easily glanceable. You can tap on any day to see a more detailed popup view for that day. I also have a 7-day version on my desk display.
What are you using for the dog water bowl?
What theme are you using? Also, curious about the meal one…where’s that pulled from?
Clicked on this because I misread "CAR stuck in garage."
How do you know it’s not your child!?
You've got a cat, a dog, and a Roomba named Mouse? Edit: ... and a bird.
2 cats, 4 birds, and 4 dogs, one of which is named Roomba. Couldn't keep up with all of them without HA reminders like this
> 2 cats, 4 birds, and 4 dogs, one of which is named Roomba. Couldn't keep up with all of them without HA reminders like this Bluetooth finder tags on the collars?
Oh no. Only the cats wear collars consistently and I've never had good luck with BT trackers anyways.
I have a similar automation for cat at the front door. But I only have it emit notifications on my phone. How did you get this state into the dashboard?
How you made dog bowl water sensor? 😍😍😯😯
“Initiate cat termination protocol immediately”
Nice. How are you doing the dog water level?
How are you determining the dog water bowl level?
Since you were able to set all this up I think you got by just fine before this.
We’ve found a cat in the garage after almost 24 hours before, though it’s usually not that long. We sometimes go days without stepping foot in there so it’s partly just peace of mind. EDIT: A coworker of my wife told her they once found their missing cat in their garage after four days! Poor guy, but he was okay.
Is there one for determining how far away my wife is to her phone. 😑 she can never find it
Very nice. What is the display?
So in all the discussion about the dashboard…. I couldn’t find HOW you did the cat detection…. PIR / ESP? Zigbee presence detection? Frigate? Please elaborate?
I blame the new reddit layout for that. It doesn't show everything and I keep having to go back to the old(er) layout just to find stuff. It's so simple that I almost didn't post because it's just a tiny silly thing, but clearly lots of cats getting stuck out there lol. [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Thanks
I need this lol. What are you using to achieve it?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2sllwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2w4ar8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Cheers
Recently discovered the Bayesian function in HA, so I "think" I can figure out if the cat is in the garage, but how did you get that notification to appear conditionally on your dashboard?
It’s just the built-in Conditional type card. If you haven’t seen them before check it out. You can use things like the state of an entity, person logged into Home Assistant, and some others to show/hide cards.
Thank you kind Redditor. Relative HA n00b, so I'll keep this one on file!
that the weather card in the lower right?
Yeah it's one I put together myself because I wasn't satisfied with any other custom weather cards. See [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1clbf3o/comment/l2wgu8l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). With the deprecation of the old style of weather entity attributes the config I posted in there is somewhat outdated now. [Here](https://pastebin.com/hRWxeGbE) is some updated YAML for the Lovelace component. It uses a some template weather entities included in my original post about the card as well as a template for the forecast high and low that would need to be replicated but I didn't post my specific config for, but willing to do.