Vacuum Automation

I dont' really know where to put this to get the best input so mods, feel free to put this in a better place or update the tags for better visibility.

I have a problem. It's my cat. He likes to eat too fast, then go barf. That isn't the real problem. It's when he eats, then goes and barfs and it's before the robot vaccum runs lol. Normally he eats dry food, but my vet suggested I supplement with wet occassionally, so I do. The other day I gave him some wet food and had him eat slow, he was fine and everything seemed to be staying down, then I went to work. I came home to the entire floor painted with soft cat food barf. It took me about 1.5 hours to clean up. SO. MUCH. FUN. :joy:

Anyhow, here's where my automation idea comes in. I've had great success automating my smart coffee maker to only turn on in th emorning if there's water int he chamber by affixing an aquara leak detector to the back o the coffee machine and extending it's probes with some super thin wire (out of a cat 6 cable) into the bottom of th ewater chamber.

My thought after this mess was to put a leak detector on the vacuum, and if it detects wet, the just tell the vacuum to stop. The vacuums are all integrated into my smart home. My thought was how can I detect that there is "wet"? For those of your that have robot vacuums, where do you think a point of detection for a moving vaccuum would best be? For the coffee maker it's simple. The vac in question is a round deebot n8+. Typical vac with a brush roller in the middle and two spinny ones on the front.

So the point of this is twofold:

  1. Where do you think I can put the leak detector probes to accurately catch "I'm going through something wet"? Maybe inside the brush area? also I'm not opposed to opening up my vacuum and modifying the shell.

  2. Is there a better solution to detecting something out of the norm during operation? (I'm not talking about rescheduling when the vacuums run, or getting ridof my cat, I mean simply a better way to detect a wet condition in a situation where something may just be "damp".

I do know this will take some trial and error, it just would help to have more people thinking about this than just me. It's how I came up with my smart coffee idea.

Thanks for any input!

This has a "vomit alert". Don't know how accurate or costly it is: Introducing Furbo 360Ā° Cat Camera: The First Pet Camera Designed Specifically for Cat Safety and Interactive Fun

Great suggestion, but I'm not a fan of yet another subscription. If that had the "vomit aleret" and was smart so I could just deschedule my vacuum using rule machine that would be a great idea, but it's not smart and only reacts with the app. Just so you know the device is $176 without a subscription or $86 with a subscription (doesn't work without a subscription).

That's a tough problem. I'm sorry to hear your cat isn't well. Would it be naive to suggest that you just don't automate this part of your life, and instead run it while you're home? We only use our Deebot vacuum for the kitchen and the dining/living room areas. There are steps up to the rest of the house and it's just too much bother to move it. The map gets really screwed up in those area too, so we just manually vacuum the rest of the house.

I've found that having a quiet robot vacuum that does a good job is one of the best parts of owning one. I have a similar attitude toward dishwashers. If the thing is so noisy that I have to run it while I'm asleep of when I'm not there, I don't want it in my life.

Not sure how well this works for cats, but over the years weā€™ve had a couple hound dogs that would basically swallow an entire bowlā€™s worth of kibble in one shot unless we used ā€œslow feederā€ bowls.

Hereā€™s an example of one I just googled:

Have you looked into something like that?

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I have to agree that the best solution is to solve the cat because it is not good for it to consistently yack.

Side rant - vets typically know little about feline nutrition or digestion. What they learn at school was probably funded by Purina. I will stop there because I don't claim to be an expert on your situation.

I sympathize with your situation but kindly suggest that automation may not be the ultimate solution.

Source: suffered through bad diagnoses and treatments for both blood sugar and fatty liver (different cats). No longer involved with either vet but learned a great deal about biologically correct diets despite them.

We had a cat many years ago that had that issue. When we feed her she would gobble it up and throw up shortly there after. We found a auto feeder at petsmart that we could setup to only dispense small portions through out the day, sort of like this one. This also had the added bonus of her not coming in and waking us up on the weekend when it was time for her to eat. This was well before I had any home automation