On 24/06/2011 00:36, Bob Blick wrote:
> Hi Oli,
> Just the one cat, sadly no longer on this plane. It takes about two
> weeks to train a cat to open doors from the outside. There's a patch of
> loop fastener fabric glued to the door, she has to grab it with her
> claws and pull the door open a bit, here's a video:
> http://bobblick.com/yumyum_hi.wmv

That's awesome - I recall you posting it a while back but somehow I=20
didn't put two and two together just now :-)
I might try some experiments with our cats.

> There's a PIC and a hobby servo on each door and a photocell that gets
> polled when the door starts to open to figure out which side of the door
> the cat is on. The doors plug into an extra wire pair in the house phone
> wiring with a simple network protocol that talks to an interface on the
> linux box that is my home fileserver and is always on.
>
> I've built a lot of cat doors over the years and the pull-open style
> outfoxes pretty much all critters, including other cats. YumYum had a
> bad hip so in her later years I moved one of the doors(the one in the
> video) from a window down to ground level and even then never had
> intruder problems. But raccoons could be a problem because they are
> strong. They probably wouldn't fit but if they tried they could break
> the mechanism.
>
> If I was doing it today I would probably use Sureflap doors, which can
> be trained to trust each cat's implanted RFID microchip. And if I had
> multiple cats I'd hack the door to get the RFID numbers to track each
> one separately. The Sureflaps must have an awesome RFID circuit, they
> run on 4 AA batteries for almost a year. Here's a link:
> http://www.sureflap.co.uk/
> You can get them in the UK and also the US. If you'd rather roll your
> own, you can get 125KHz RFID readers at seeedstudio. The microchips in
> disposable syringes are on Ebay or Amazon. I recommend the Bayer brand.
> I wouldn't implant them myself, but here in the US there is no
> standardization in pet RFID so the brand does matter and you might need
> to bring the one you want to your veterinarian.
>

That's great info, I will check it all out. If I get round to doing=20
anything interesting I post it here.
Thanks!

> Cheerful regards,
>
> Bob
>
> --=20


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