Keeping Tabs on Your Tabby
Cats can be very secretive, but Catto Dashboard will alert you if they aren't feeling well.
Cats are well known for the way that they like to keep to themselves at times. Your cat could be happily sitting by your side one moment and then suddenly disappear the next, only to be found asleep hours later in a high-up, secluded spot. You just never know what you're going to get with these unpredictable, but adorable, little balls of fur.
This is more than just a cute little quirk, however. Cats use this same personality trait to hide it when they aren’t feeling well. That is concerning, because it could turn a minor condition into a big problem by delaying a trip to the vet.
GitHub user earlynerd came up with a clever plan to expose the secret lives of cats so that little problems won’t go untreated any longer. The solution earlynerd came up with is called Catto Dashboard. It connects to the APIs of smart litter box cloud services to collect relevant health data, then it displays the data on an ePaper display.
The dashboard is powered by a Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 Full-color ePaper Display. It has a large 7.3-inch E Ink screen, so it is great for reading from across the room and displaying complex charts and graphs. And since it comes equipped with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, it is an all-in-one hardware solution. It can use its onboard Wi-Fi connection to collect data from the API and keep the screen up-to-date.
Catto Dashboard uses an SD card to store a full year’s worth of data. It connects to the API every two hours to collect new measurements, then the microcontroller goes into a deep sleep state to save battery after updating the display. Since the display is ePaper, it requires no power input once it has been updated.
The full source code for the project is available on GitHub, so go grab it if you want to keep better tabs on your tabby.