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What's the best cat flap? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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Local integration, no cloud preferred.

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[–] 3 points 9 months ago (6 children)

what information are you looking to get in to HA from the cat flap?

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Lock and unlock control and status mainly.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Because you want to keep your cat from going in/out at certain times or what?

    We just have one of those chip-enabled flaps so it only unlocks for our cats. 100% offline with no cloud connection whatsoever. I personally don't really see any benefit to remote locking/unlocking the flap, if I wanted to manage when my cat can enter/leave the home I wouldn't have a flap.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    We don’t let our cats out at night so it would be great to have a cat flap that knew whether each cat was in the house or not and could either lock the flap or lock it on in-only at a certain time of day.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    You can at least get the who's in/out with a pair of cheap cameras (one inside, one out) and the frigate add-on. Set up for cat detection it's fairly decent:

    If you build up enough images of your creatures, you could even train a model to recognise them each specifically.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    That looks good. The current cats look very different from one another so I reckon that we’d only need three pictures to train it.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Hey,

    Another user helped me out by sending me a Sureflap.

    You can still integrate this into homeassistant - just need to buy in a particular esp unit and contact Peter on the homeassistant forums (see thread) for the firmware.

    We're all set up now:

    The OnlyCat flap looks very nice, but the price is insane & the online requirement is a deal-breaker. Even the non-sub option requires activation online afaik, so that's just no.

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