the link ‘Tomomi Imura demonstrates’ doesn’t appear to work.

I’ve recently had a RFID-tag reading Cat-flap fitted into some new glazing and was wondered whether I could attach it to an RPi to track the comings and goings of my future feline owners (I am currently dispossessed) but no, this is not going to be easy as I hoped!

At the moment there does seem to be a dearth of UK Cat-flap manufacturers providing I/O capabilities “out-of-the-box” with the only option being a bit of DIY hardware hackery. Seems they are missing a market share there – a PoE solution would mean they could both power and provide Home Automation (“Which Cat is in or out right now?”) in one swell foop. For those with more extensive dwellings where multiple Cat-Flaps are required this could really pay off “Tiddles is booked for the Vet later today, she alone must be kept inside; Rover (he thinks he is a dog) is free to roam as he usually does…”!

Didn’t you know this is wat the internetz was invented for. Lolcats rulez.

@Stephen, when we initially started talking about the project we wanted to use Daphne’s RFID chip to trigger the Pi as the catflap reads it to let her in, and I had a long email conversation with one of the experts at Element 14 about that. Turns out it was sort of theoretically possible, but not really doable. That said, it’s a couple of years ago, so someone might well have come up with a way to do that now.

WRT managing separate cats, Sureflap, the makers of Daphne’s catflap, now does a flap that can set permissions for individual cats. All you need to do now is cobble together a way for the Pi to recognise each cat, maybe via the face recognition project linked to in the piece above?

With all those tweets the Internet will become 100% cats not 99%.
I wonder if the door (Humanflap) is jealous.

I feel a little prototyping with our littlebits and cloudbit coming on…time to extricate the necessary bits from our minecraft-controlled lego sweetie dispenser.

All I can say is that “cat” is a perfectly useful *n*x utility for disgorging the fabulous contents of regal filesystem elements, and that there’s a reason why “dog” is dyslexic for “god” and not “tac” :D

OTOH, we have five fingers (furiously typing on another keyboard at ~200 wpm, as usual) and this demonstrates why there’s a song about “Who let the dogs out?” and not “Who let the cats out?”. No self-respecting dog (which is redundant, of course) would ever tweet every time it’s gone out to solve the apparent lawn fertilizer shortage problem. They also tend to not bring back nasty trophies either, taking care of the feeding problem themselves. That other species is only interested in humans when it’s time to eat – go do something with that carcass you hauled in and unceremoniously dumped on the carpet or, more likely, in an inaccessible corner. Its presence will only become known through olfactory senses, or a long trail of ants, sometime much, much later. Then there are cats and laser pointers – need I say more? ;)

OK canine fans, let’s show them what a _real_ piece of computing-integrated engineering looks like, capable of handling breeds closer in size, musculature, and intelligence to horses than rodents! :P

Facial recognition would be great if it could alert me to the imminent need to rescue a rodent from certain death, or chase one around the house. Our cats have two flaps – one into the garage and then from the garage into the house. If the first flap could tell the second to lock itself until the rodent is dealt with, I’d have a much easier time with the rescues.