I recently purchased a Cat Litter Robot and want to intergrate it into ST.
I’ve seen a topic where an open/close sensor is mounted onto it to detect the robot ‘rotating’ the litter and a DTH/SmartApp developed to digest that data.
However, I’d like to do a more precise integration if possible and leverage all the sensors that are already part of the robot. It looks like the Litter Robot has a wiring harness that is used to communicate control of the motor(s) and read sensor(s).
I’m wondering if it might be possible to monitor these circuits by tapping into the harness and detecting when these circuits are active with something like an ESP8266/NodeMCU. I was thinking the GPIO pins could detect a hi/lo state, but I’m not sure what needs to be done circuitry-wise to monitor the signals in the harness and convert that to feedback for the GPIO pins to detect.
Any thoughts? (Besides telling me it will void my warranty. )
I have just been looking at this (litter box) myself for a newly adopted cat. Without the it being wifi you are basically going to have to engineer a solution with either a SmartThings Shield or with possibly a Raspberry Pi…I can help with the DTH stuff, and will even integrate it in with Ask Alexa if you get it working…however, my degree in electronics expired when I hit 20 years post
I’ve been learning a bit about the nodeMCU thanks to the work @heythisisnate has done with his solution for monitoring the wired home security sensors using the nodeMCU. I’m fairly confident a similar architecture could be used. (it uses wifi). I’m no stranger to coding, just fairly new to ST/Groovy development. I think my biggest hurdle at this point is the circuitry. I think the last time I was able to understand or design a schematic for simple circuits was almost 30 years ago.
The litter robot is pretty nice. If you are concerned about the price, you can keep an eye out for a reconditioned version on their site which are available from time to time and save you about $90 USD.
It seems like a wifi version of this robot is a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want to know how many times their cat eliminates in a day, or get smart phone notifications each time?
I have had that box for about a year and a half. I have a sensor on it and that does the trick for me. It alerts me if it’s stuck and tries to self heal with some webcore pistons. Those are rarely used but nice to have.
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