Let me in Summer
I think some guy did a HackaDay or Instructables about this a few years ago using Arduino. He got it to recognize his cat’s face to keep out other neighborhood cats. But to give the software enough time to recognize the face, the cat had to go through a 3-ft tunnel. Our cat door is built into the real door, so I can’t attach a tunnel to the outside. But our problem isn’t the wrong cats coming in. What I need is to detect if the cat has something in its mouth like a rat, which they love to bring in alive to play with and immediately lose so I have to root them out. Our cats are dumbasses.
A few years ago I saw someone just simply checking for a cat head silhouette. Was enough to deter other animals and also worked to recognise if the cat had caught something.
We have a cat flap that detects the RFID chip in her shoulder. It seems to be broken since a few weeks. But our cat (and not the stupid neighbour’s cat) can open it anyways with a little prying with her claw. But luckily that doesn’t work as well when she has an animal in her mouth. So we will probably leave it broken.
If this could also prevent your cat from bringing in prey to your house, it would sell even better.
Bird in mouth -> door keeps shut
Because reading a radio signal from the chip was too easy?
Yes, they are really cheap and the law (here in Sweden at least) requires all outdoor cats to be chipped. So the cat is probably already chipped anyway.
Even if for some reason you didn’t want to chip your cat (you should absolutely chip your cats and dogs) it would be trivial to just put a tiny receiver in something that dangles off their collar for the door to communicate with.
Personally don’t want to leave collars on my cats, I also don’t let them outside much though beyond our patio.
Chips are implants that go under the skin. Most civilized places require pets to have them in urban places.
A tag with proximity around the neck has to be the simpler and more cost effective solution. Thats just dumb tech bloat bs.
My pet door just reads their microchips. You can get a collar tag if they’re not chipped.
I’m not the person you asked, but I use microchip-based feeders for my cats and the company also sells microchip doors. I’ve been pretty happy with the feeders, but haven’t had any reason to try the doors.
https://www.surepetcare.com/en-us/pet-doors/microchip-pet-door
But what if the neighbors cat reverse engineers the RFID signal and breaks into your house to steal all the cat food. What then?
