Forgive me for my ignorance regarding Arduino, I'm just now getting involved.
I have two indoor only cats that I sometimes have to leave home alone while I'm on vacation. I'd love to be able to log into a website and see where in my apartment they currently are.
The website I can make easily, it is getting the data for their location that I have no clue how to do. My thought is that if I had a few sensors in the apartment and then something emitting a signal on the cats, I could then "triangulize" their location by looking at the strength of the signal from the different sensors.
And that's all I got.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could do this or if it is feasible?
As far as sensors go... my guess is you could look into RFID tags... although, I think these won't be powerful enough for you to triangulate the cats position. If not, you could at least know where the cats were by which door they went through. although this would kinda transform every room in your house to a shop. LOL
Or, you can use PIR sensors (if you don't have them already for the alarm) and try to hack that signal to be wired into your arduino. This had the problem of identifying which cat is where. Is your house so big that you need to triangulate the position?
Next, getting the data on the internet, you can either choose to have a computer communicate with the arduino via USB/radio and the computer sends the data to the database. Or... buy an Ethernet shield and POST data to a .php script or even use Pachube.
There is a somewhat very different example of a guy that did something similar to log his hamster. But he could only manage to log the hamster wheel turns. Which I completely understand why. LOL
Don't folks have cameras they monitor over the internet? Mount some of those, connect to PC, stream it out.
Up to you to visually scan for them in their favorite sleeping spots, where they typically spend 22 hours a day in my experience!