The Visible Kitteh Project

My latest project isn't much of a robot in the traditional sense. That is it has virtually no moving parts. It will all told in fact have 1 single linear actuator. However since it does have at least one and is controlled by a computer brain and more importantly I think people will find it interesting I wanted to post it here. I call it The Visible Kitteh Project. The main page for the project can be found here: http://www.visiblekitteh.com Problem Description: We have a problem. His name is Timothy. He is a sweet if very _loud_ tabby cat that we love dearly. One thing we really don't love however is the carnage. Timothy is a very good hunter and his favorite thing to do with his prey after he has caught it is bring it inside and finish it off under my wife's desk. Now this poses two problems. First, cleaning blood, feathers, fur and viscera out of the carpet under the desk and off the walls. Second, some times they get away. My wife is tired of cleaning the carpet under her desk. I am tired of chasing field mice around the house with a shoebox. It is time for a change. Requirements: Prevent the cat from being able to enter the house when he has an animal in his mouth. Nice to have's: Do so in a way that doesn't terrify the other cat whom we are trying to train to use the cat door to enter the house. Methodology: Object Recognition using Haar Cascades. Implementing it using the OpenCV libraries Java bindings for Android. Ultimately I would like to try and switch back to doing this on the Arduino platform for a low cost, low power consumption solution but I just couldn't find enough reference code or documentation to learn how to do it. Source code (such as it is) is here https://github.com/omadawn/VisibleKitteh

Update 04/21 12:30 am TVKP Went live Phase I Data logging mode.

https://sites.google.com/a/forstersfreehold.com/visible-kitteh-project/home/announcements/champaign-phaseonedatalogginginplace

Update 05/01 I finally seem to have resolved the repeated problems I've been having trying to threshold pixel brightness. Thanks in no small part to help from some of the cats here on LMR.

http://bit.ly/IDmXiG