How I use Home Assistant to help with my cats

I'm a big Home Assistant fan and power user. It's the home automation platform of choice in our house and I've added many devices and automations, sometimes to the chagrin of Rachelle.

We also have five cats so it only makes sense to use some automations to help manage all the cat chores.

The dashboard #

To help me stay organized and visualize all the cat automations and functionality, I've created a cats dashboard. Let's walk through the dashboard, and I'll explain as we go.

Cat door #

Our cats are indoor/outdoor cats and we have a SureFlap Microchip Cat Flap (opens in a new tab). This thing talks to a little Sure Petcare hub in our living room, and that hub is what connects to Home Assistant. It's Cloud Polling (opens in a new tab), which isn't the best but when I was shopping, I couldn't find one with better local connectivity.

It allows us to use Home Assistant to lock the door when needed so the cats can't go out. Home Assistant does this on a schedule. It's open during the day but prevents the goblins from leaving after sunset.

All of our cats have a microchip and it uses this chip ID to only allow our cats in. That means no neighborhood cats or raccoons can use the door, thank you please. We also get presence reporting so we can generally see who's in, who's out and when they transitioned.

Automatic feeders #

We have Aqara Smart Pet Feeders (opens in a new tab) that we use to dispense breakfast and snacks. They're zigbee devices so they connect directly to Home Assistant and are fully local. No Aqara app needed for any part of it. These are pretty basic devices and I wish it could alert us on food level but alas, they simply dispense. The automatic feeders hit at 6 a.m., a time I set from a tile on the dashboard rather than hardcoding it. Cats go scattering every which way to get their spot at a feeder.

Litter boxes #

We have two Litter Robot 4s (opens in a new tab) we purchased used from Facebook Marketplace. They're Cloud Push, which means the internet has to be up for these to work correctly with Home Assistant (or I presume the Whisker app). This thing allows us to unlock a couple of fun automations.

Voice announcements when a Litter Robot is full #

When a litter box is full, Home Assistant announces it over the speakers: "The black litter robot is full and needs to be emptied." Then when we're up there, we pull the bag of dirty litter and reset it. If it needs a top off, we do that too. With two litter boxes and five cats, we can go a few days before one of them needs to be emptied! Not bad.

Send the robot vacuum after a cat has used the robot litter box #

This is probably one of my favorite automations. Home Assistant can detect when a cat uses a litter box, which allows us to trigger automations to send the Roomba to spot clean the litter box area. We gate when the vacuum can run as we don't want the thing running during the middle of the night if a cat goes to the bathroom.

Helpers and trackers #

So there are several helpers and trackers we use to keep up with everyone's different dates and things and such.

• Flea collar: We use Seresto flea collars (opens in a new tab) and they need to be replaced about every 8 months. I set up a helper to track this so it announces it in the good morning announcement message when it's due.
• Age: Based on their birthday!
• With Us: Based on their gotcha date!
• Yearly Vaccines: I've not built this yet but I plan to also track when each cat received their vaccinations so I can remember when it's time to reschedule.

Improvements #

Cat door #

I purchased the wrong cat door. When we first purchased it, we had Oliver and he was a bigger boy and I was skeptical he could fit through the smaller door. The problem is the larger door is all or nothing: locked or unlocked, for everybody. The smaller flap they sell can be set per cat. That would have been helpful in the past when someone was sick or wasn't confident using the cat door yet and we were going to be away. We could restrict the kitten or the sick kitty while letting the rest come and go as usual.

Automatic feeders #

I wish the Aqara feeders reported food levels instead of just dispensing. I also wish the automatic feeders were the chip variety and allowed us to restrict certain feeders to only certain cats. Linus likes to go around and finish off everyone else's bowls.

Water fountains #

We purchased an AquaPurr (opens in a new tab) fountain but have never fully installed it. We had it in one of the bathrooms but disconnected it. My plan is to move it into the guest bathroom then hopefully we can stop fiddling with these little plastic filter ones. This thing doesn't connect to anything but it would be super nice to eliminate the water fountain clean chore.

Conclusion #

So that's it! Thanks for reading this. Do you have any smart home automations that you especially like?