There is a cat that wanders around my neighbourhood. I wanted to build something that would notify me whenever it came to my backyard. The post describes what I did

Curious: Why? Do you want to feed it? Shoo it away? Get to know it? Avoid letting your cat out when it's around?

Good karma mainly

This comment might be confusing - I misread what the question was

I feed the cat for good karma

The picture stuff was to get a notification to tell when it was coming to eat

I would do this to make friends. There's a really friendly cat I see about once a week. I'm sure he's around more.

Written in a non-emotional, detached, and non-sensational style. I was even wondering if it was written by chatGPT

Our culture must have fallen quite far if we can't expect that from human writers anymore!

Nicely done, I like the straightforward dedicated nature of the project. Even years after the Raspberry Pi has been out I still enjoy reading how people use it. I suppose the cat factor does play a role in it though.

Reminds of this post of someone who added a camera to the little cat door because the cat kept bringing 'gifts' (mice) indoors. He used ML to detect if the cat brought a gift. In that case he temporarily locked it.

Not sure if it is the same project, but I remember something like that from a long time ago. The cat would walk through a backlit tunnel and project a black and white silhouette of its profile onto a low res camera.

They used a very simple neural network to do the detection. Several example pictures were included in the write up, showing the cat normally, one where it was holding a mouse, as well as a profile of a possum (IIRC).

Replicating those results has been on my to-do list for over a decade.

The cat, for which I read the post:

https://imgur.com/a/vYs1W1L

Great project! I have wanted to do something similar with my hummingbird feeder to determine what time of day the birds tend to visit most often.

Go for it!

You can piggy back on my object detection api - it can detect birds - just tried with the image => https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1520638023360-6def43369781...

Request example => https://pastebin.com/1Wnyb6PD

I am trying to build something similar with my raspberry pi - but with a temperature detector sensor. Btw well written, just how a tech article should be, no fluff and to the point!