If you have a cat at home, you already know very well that the felines go to their ball. Some are extremely active and some are very lazy. However, there is something common in all domestic cats, and that is that they think that humans have to work 24 hours a day for them and always be attentive to what happens to them. The cat that we are going to talk about today is one of those who likes walking, and his owner has devised a smart doorbell so that the feline comes home when it feels like it and does not have to wait outside.
Artificial Intelligence to give freedom to the cat
Tennis Smith is a software developer who has come up with a way to give your cat independence. Apparently, your feline doesn’t like staying home doing nothing at all. The animal takes advantage of some hours of the day to walk around the neighborhood, hunt the occasional bug and meet more people of its kind. At the time of the papeo, the pussycat returns home. On occasion, Smith I did not hear the arrival of the catwho stayed at the door meowing until they paid attention to him.
Smith had been thinking about this, and came up with a somewhat peculiar way to get his cat into the house safely. After much thought, he came to the conclusion that he could create a doorbell for cats. A IoT device able to recognize meows.
Open up, I’m the cat
The bell that Tennis Smith has designed is a IoT device connected to Amazon Web Services servers. The programmer has used a raspberry pi that you have placed in an insulating casing. The board has a wired Internet connection and a series of microphones. The entire system has been installed at the door of his home.
How does it work? Well hold on, because Smith has killed flies with cannon fire. At first glance, you might think that the easiest way to implement such an idea is with an NFC tag or similar on the cat’s collar. But that would make it very easy for any thief, who could use the pussycat to sneak into your house.
Smith’s idea goes the other way. When the pet returns home after doing his cat thing, he will simply stand at the door and meow to be opened. So far, everything is the same as before. But now, the meows are picked up by the microphones that are connected to the Raspberry Pi. In fact, the microphones are connected all day, and are dedicated to collecting the ambient sound of the street. All this information is processed using information technology. TensorFlow Litea artificial intelligence capable of recognizing sound patterns. Thus, the Raspberry Pi can recognize “the voice of the cat”.
When the sound recognition detects the sound of the cat, the Raspberry Pi notifies the AWS servers, which end up sending a phone notification Smith to open the door for the pussycat.
Do it yourself
Worst of all, Smith has released all the guidance for designing this system. On GitHub you have all the code that the developer has written in Python, as well as the tutorial to configure the device and connect it to Amazon servers.
