Smart Cat Attractor

Motivation

Maybe you know the situation: you are working on something very focused on your laptop or eating in the kitchen and then kitty jumps right onto your keyboard or lap demanding your attention. It is actually a great blessing to have them around and to spend time with them, but sometimes it's just not the right time. 

Solution

The Smart Cat Attractor addresses this circumstance by providing you with a means to draw kitties attention in another direction. It does so by playing an audio file - like the ringing of a bell - your kitty is conditioned to. 

How To Do

You can condition your kitty to the sound of that bell by attaching it to a toy kitty loves to play together with you, like a feather wand. But this really depends on your cat. Try different things! Record that sound and store it on an Arduino YUN (or an Raspberry PI) that is connected to your local wifi network, attach a usb sound adapter and a speaker, install a python library that enables you to play sounds remotely from your smartphones browser, place it somewhere you want kitty to run, hit play and off it goes! 

Bonus

For bonus points, you might add some FIMO casing that makes the thing look sweet.

How This Came To Life

I am hosting FIMO events once in a while at my place and one time I happened to mash it up with an Arduino tinkering hour. So the overall topic was Smart FIMO... add some cats and you get quite a good sense on how this project did happen.

Closing Statement

Though it was fun prototyping, I believe it is not a good habit using this often, since it is based on an unfair psychological trick and it will ruin kitties trust in you because in a way you are betraying it when you play the sound but you don't play the toy. Consider it as a last refuge when there seems to be no more escape. Meow.

References

I used the following piece of code to make the YUN play sounds: https://learn.adafruit.com/wifi-yun-soundboard/overview