Hello everyone. I have basic electronics and programming skills but I am just getting into Arduino. Currently, I am planning a project and I am looking for advice.
I have three cats and a relatively big house and it can be a pain to track them down sometimes. They always find the perfect hiding places... They live outside, but we let them in the house during the day. I was thinking that I should make a cat detector to track them down in the house.
Collar: The cats would have a special collar with an RF module. Passive or active, depending on how waterproof would an active module be. Detector: I would make or buy an RF transmitter/receiver module with an Arduino. This would be the detector itself. It would have an antenna and would beep/blink if I am pointing it in the direction of one of the cats. Requirements:
Range: minimum 3-5 meters. Detecting would happen mostly indoors. Weather conditions are irrelevant.
The antenna should be directional - I want to detect in the direction I am pointing at. Guessing that a conical shape of 90-120 degrees would be realistic.
Identification: I do NOT need identification - the tags would not be unique, they should not need to hold any information.
The collars should be small and waterproof. The cats would wear it all the time, indoors and outdoors.
The detector should be small and handheld (running on batteries and easy to use). I would go up to around $50-$70 for the bill of materials.
Signals, noise, etc.: this is a domestic environment, we have Wifi, Bluetooth, 433 MHz smart devices, strong FM signal in the area.
Ideas:
RFID is all the rage nowadays, but it seems like it is not suitable for my needs. It is either short-range and cheap, or long-range and expensive (and also it transfers information I do not care about that much). It would be convenient, though, since you can get completely waterproof passive RFID tags that would be easy to use.
I was thinking of building my own antenna and detector, I have zero experience but I always wanted to learn more about RF.
So my idea is to use either 13.56 or 433 MHz RFID tags with my own home-made antenna and transmitter/receiver circuit, but is there an easier or better way? Other standards I should look out for? Also, suggestions for literature about antenna design would be much appreciated. Or keywords to help me do more research on this topic.
digitaltos:
I was thinking that I should make a cat detector to track them down in the house.
Unless you want to attach a GPS receiver and a suitable wireless transmitter (to send the GPS location to your control unit) to each cat I think this project is wishful thinking.
And as GPS does not work reliably indoors or for short distances even that idea is unlikely to be useful.
PerryBebbington:
There's a simple way for me to find my cat; I just have to drop some treats into a metal bowl and the sound will have him looking for them.
Cats have better sensors than anything made by man
Thanks guys. So this type of directional antenna shenanigans is not feasible at this scale, and making my cats wifi compatible is not practical. I love the thermal gun idea though
These cats are the sleepy type, you know? The ones that sleep on your subwoofer during the death metal playlist... and they decide when treat time is.
A thick book size directional antenna for 2.4Ghz is just about possible. There are foil reflectors you can put on a wifi antenna to both improve reception a bit and this kludge is semi directive.
But then the issue is the range indoors, over seperate rooms floors, especially given the probale size of the transmitter and battery which implies very low power.
So maybe you just need to find a very low power very long range 2.4Ghz radio system.
digitaltos:
These cats are the sleepy type, you know? The ones that sleep on your subwoofer during the death metal playlist... and they decide when treat time is.
