My wife is about to cave and let me get the cat I really want . But she wants the cat to use the litter box in the garage. She wants one of those cat doors that sense microchips to keep the other cats out of the garage. Would it be possible to rig something up so that if the cat is in the garage, one of the garage lights outside turns on a certain color? We tend to use the garage door more than the front door, and don't want any accidental escapes.
@Bago hope you don't mind me taking you
Yes. We have the SurePet (f/k/a SureFlap) Pet Door. It senses the chip in our cats and uses an integration ported to Hubitat by Dominick Meglio (@dman2306). Works well, installs via HPM. For us, it opens onto our enclosed patio, and turns on a light on the patio at night if either of the cats is out.
You will need to get the SurePet WiFi hub in order to use the integration with Hubitat.
Here is the door:
https://www.surepetcare.com/en-gb/pet-doors/microchip-pet-door-connect
Here is the integration:
Here is the simple Rule:
Here is what it looks like:
And, I might add, seriously consider getting a Litter Robot 3 Connect, which also has an integration ported to Hubitat by Dominick Meglio (@dman2306). It will change your life. I have a set of rules inspired by Jared Zimmerman (@jared.zimmerman) that turns our bathroom undercounter lightstrips green, yellow, red depending on the litter level, and that flashes if an error condition exists (needs emptying, fault, etc.). I put a contact sensor on the litter drawer, and a rule resets the cycle counter if the drawer stays open for over 90 seconds (as happens when you change the litter bag). No need to ever use their foolish app.
1 Like
No problem. I built one that works for my cats, but I wanted it to work with the dogs. Scaling the door up to accommodate the dogs meant the antenna was larger. My problem was that the size of antenna in the microchip is small, so with a larger antenna, I would need more power to trigger the chip. I never got it to be reliable and safe for the dogs.
I know this is an old topic but can you give me a sense of what you can control via Hubitat with this cat door? For example, can you track if the cat is in or out? Can you lock and unlock the door? Etc.?
Well, first a clarification. SureFlap’s API in combination with the Hubitat integration ported by Dominick Meglio long ago from SmartThings is junk. The Hubitat HTTP interface seems fragile, can cause the JVM stack to overflow and crash when lots of HTTP errors occur. SureFlap’s server, in recent times, seems to go offline frequently or throw errors. When these errors occur, the Hubitat integration will delete the pets, so your rules and dashboard tiles will become corrupted. I tried by putting wrappers around all the HTTP calls, and it helped, but I could never make it reliable.
So, here’s what I did a couple years ago, and it’s been 100% reliable: I moved this SureFlap integration, and all the other HTTP cloud integrations (e.g., MyQ - now on ratGDO; Somfy myLink, Litter Robot) over to Home Assistant, and I bring all the devices over to Hubitat via HADB (what an amazing piece of community-contributed software, well maintained). Works perfectly. I just use Home Assistant for its drivers, no automations on Home Assistant, all automation done by Rule Machine on Hubitat.
I just bought a Home Assistant Yellow to handle these cloud devices. A Home Assistant Green, less expensive but not available when I bought the HA Yellow, would work equally well. An advantage is that, now that Dominick Meglio has left the Hubitat platform, all of the now-unsupported drivers that he ported, and which haven fallen by the wayside, are now actively maintained on Home Assistant and the devices are brought over to Hubitat via HADB. It’s painless and reliable.
It isolates the cloud problems to Home Assistant, which seems to handle the HTTP cloud errors fine.
Back to your original question about functionality: with SureFlap on Home Assistant, brought to Hubitat by HADB, the pet presence is seen 100% by Hubitat and can be reported on a Dashboard and used by Rules. Battery level is seen correctly by Hubitat and can be reported on a Dashboard and can be used by notifiers when battery level is low. Pet Door lock can be locked and unlocked, but I use the SureFlap app’s schedule to lock and unlock the doors.
Here are some screen shots of the devices on dashboards and of the devices page:
Here is what one of the pet device pages look like, which I use for presence sensing:
As you can see, I’ve got two SureFlap pet doors on my SureFlap hub.
Anything more that you would like to see?
3 Likes
Wow, thanks for taking the time to respond. I've been putting off Home Assistant, but I know I'm going to have to go over there eventually. Perhaps this will be the reason. Ironically, I use Hubitat pretty much the same way you use Home Assistant and I do almost all of my automations in Node-Red. What I'm hoping to accomplish is locking the cat door so my kitten can't go out into the garage anytime either of my cars connect to my home wi-fi. If's he already in there, then I'll probably have it disable opening the garage door.
2 Likes
Edit: Disregard, I found the answer. It says it works with both.
One more quick question. Is the integration specific to the PET Door Connect or does it also work with the CAT Door Connect?
Works with both. That’s the reason for the variety of Lock push buttons (see screenshots of devices). Not all the doors lock the same way. It’s really well done.
1 Like
Could anyone please help me. I installed the app and all the drivers and set it up the way everyone was saying and everything goes fine, the cats are found but their presense always show as null. Is there anyways to fix that and what do I have to do?
Perhaps not what you want to hear, but:
-
Before he left Hubitat for Home Assistant, Dominick Meglio, who ported the Sure Petcare integration to Hubitat from SmartThings, worked with me to make the Hubitat integration more reliable. He doesn’t/didn’t have one of the Sure Petcare devices, so I gave him Remote Admin credentials to my system and he did make it more reliable, but not perfect. The Hubitat cloud networking interface has a lot of issues in network edge cases (Sure Petcare’s server goes down a lot), and would cause the Hubitat integration to blow up, and still does.
-
My solution was to move all cloud integrations (Litter Robot, Sure Petcare, ratGDO, etc.) onto a Home Assistant instance, and bring those devices into Hubitat using HADB.
Works perfectly, completely reliable. Also has the advantage that the integrations are well supported and actively maintained by the large Home Assistant community. Essentially, I am using Home Assistant as a dongle for cloud integrations, much like a Hue or Lutron hub.
So, in short, even if you get the Hubitat Sure Petcare integration working, it won’t be reliable, at least in my experience. A serious problem it has is that it tries to be too clever in auto configuration of pets. If, in its depths, a networking error occurs when it periodically polls the Sure Petcare hub or server, it decides to delete the pets, causing all the rules using those pets to break. No fun, happened at least once a week for me.
Has been 100% reliable since I moved it to Home Assistant to do the device management and pass entities to Hubitat using HADB.
2 Likes
@672southmain thanks to your advice I can say that I'm using mine in the same way and it's working quite well. My cat is an indoor cat so I use it to let the cat out into the garage. I do all of my automations with node-red and I'm able to get verbal notifications from Alexa when the cat comes and goes. I also get alerted when the battery level drops below 15% and I have it lock out my garage door when he's out there so he doesn't escape. And, I use it to keep him in the house when the garage door is open. Works like a charm, so thank you!
1 Like
You can also use Alexa to tell you where the cat is. Have Alexa turn on a virtual switch (with auto-off a second later) when you ask Alexa where the cat is. Then, have the virtual switch trigger a rule (or, in your case, Node Red) to check the Presence attribute of the cat on the SurePet door (brought over from Home Assistant by HADB). Then, have Alexa announce an appropriate phrase (I use Echo Speaks) telling where the cat is. It’s a little more complex if you have multiple cats, as I do, in which case you can ask “Alexa, where is Thor?”, or “Alexa, where is Loki?”, or “Alexa, where are the cats?” (necessitating a combined response with the location of each cat), but it’s a nice touch that my wife enjoys, and that amazes the visitors to our home.
I had success with the Sure Pet and Hubitat. Alas my cats are too big for the door and fussy. I'm not touching that flap with "my nose." I ended up building a custom door to accommodate their girth. They open it using their paw. I have a motion sensor which announces their coming and going and activates a video capture. It is a primitive solution as there is no locking feature and no microchip recognition. The last time I used the Sure Flap was when there was a stray in the area. I attached it to a plywood shelter in the hopes of it having a chip which the Sure Pet could read. The cat did. Alas its owner had dropped him off and went moved away. We now we have a big orange cat.
