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Andy

Internet of Poop: How (and Why) I Built a Smart Litter Tray

Naturally, we want our pets to be as healthy and happy as possible, and just as with humans, one valuable metric to know is their weight. Knowing the weight of our four-legged friends, not only helps us to verify that they have a healthy amount of body fat, but can also can be used to detect things early on that may need medical attention. As they cannot speak to us and tell us when don’t feel well, it is our duty to listen to all of the different signals we have to understand their wellbeing.

Photo of a black shorthair cat sitting.

That’s why I wanted to know the weight of my cat, Ellie. Unfortunately, she really dislikes being picked up or handled, even by people she trusts. This means, it’s not possible to weigh her on a bathroom scale, and the only datapoint I have is her yearly examination at the vets. 

I wanted to build something that would fit into her life to track her weight automatically, without any intervention. I decided to modify her litter box, so that on each visit it records her weight.

But WHY, Andy?

Okay I get it; you think it’s weird. So here are the main goals of the project: 

  • Track Ellie’s weight because I want to know how heavy she is without going to the vet
  • Learn something about how load cells work
  • Have fun building a new project
  • (Hopefully) Inspire others to try out new ideas and projects by sharing what I learned. 
  • Track the weight of poops because I thought that was funny. 

The Hardware

Rather than build the whole litter tray from scratch, I decided to build a platform that her existing litter tray would rest on. This platform would contain all the equipment necessary to detect when Ellie was using the litter and start taking measurements.

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Andy

How I Made My Bathroom Fan Smart

When I moved into my house, it came with this and old fan in the bathroom to keep the moisture down when you’ve had a shower, the bathroom itself is in the inside of the building and doesn’t have any external walls / windows, so the fan is really important to keeping it dry and non-moldy.

The original extractor worked well enough, but I’ve never really been that happy with it; it’s kind of noisy when running at full speed and has a trickle mode that runs it at low speed all the time – ostensibly this is to keep the room fresh, but in reality, means that the room Is always cold in the winter. It’s also not very well installed – is the case not fully closed on the fan focusing, and when I tried to close it up tightly the fan scraped the inside of the case and made an awful noise.

More recently the humidistat that makes it speed up automatically stopped working, meaning that after a shower the room would stay damp for hours afterwards. I’ve tried taking the fan apart and cleaning it in case it was just dust and grime of the sensor. But that didn’t help, so I set about replacing it. This being 2021 with nothing better to do, I decided to make it smart and control it from software.

After some research, I used a Manrose MF 100T inline fan, looking down the spec sheets, it is quieter, more electricity efferent and moves more air than the existing solution so seems like a great fit.

Photo of installed extractor fan in attic with inlet and outlet tubes.

To control the fan, I used a Shelly 1 relay – I’ve used some Shelly 1 PM relays in a couple of other places that I’ll write about soon, and I’ve so far been super happy with their ease of use and reliability.

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