I have “bad” cat which hops onto the kitchen countertop and dinner table when I’m away. As soon as he sees me or hears me, he knows he is in a prohibited area and he jumps down. Conceptually, I imagine that the wyze camera detects the cat on the countertop and then triggers some device that generates a sound to tell him to get down. Ideally, the generated sound would be my recorded voice telling him to “get down”.
What are the ways to achieve this?
My efforts so far:
(1) I’ve tested the camera, and it appears to be able to generate smart notifications when it only detects the cat. Other motions do not trigger a notification.
(2) My research suggests that the camera’s notification could trigger a sound from the wyze universal chime by using automation; however, I don’t know if the predefined chime sounds would be effective in deterring the cat. I’d much prefer the options for the chime sound off with my pre-recorded voice, or a high-pitched chime the cats don’t like, or even a subsonic sound that is used by many other pest deterrent systems. Can this universal chime be configured to do this? What do I need to accomplish this?
(Note: I do not have a wyze doorbell camera. I have Cam V2)
I’d welcome ideas on what has worked for other people – or even suggestions on how to integrate different components that would accomplish this.
There’s a specialty audio device that special effects people use for haunted houses – when people walk by a hidden ghoul and suchlike it speaks. @wildbill 's daughter is in that or an adjacent field, I think. Maybe he knows.
Most of them are just motion activated, so wouldn’t trigger just by the cat but by any detected movement. One could probably connect a sound device to a Wyze plug and setup a rule to turn it on when a pet is detected and turn it off after a minute or so.
There are a lot of ways to do this. A really simple way is to get an old Android device.
Save an audio file of your voice saying what you want it to say on the Android device.
Install the wyze app and turn on notifications. Have that camera limited to watch the countertop for pets.
Get a notification parsing app like Tasker or macrodroid or something like that. There are free open source ones too, but I haven’t really used those.
Have the notification parsing app watch for any notification from that camera name? Maybe with a pet detection. As the trigger. Then set the action to play the recorded audio file of your voice.
Last step: watch your cat get desensitized to audio file action and keep doing it anyway
What we really need is for Wyze to develop a camera that has a squirt gun in it and can aim and shoot a small squirt of water toward a pet that’s in a no pet zone. That would be awesome.
The only way I’ve realistically found to get my cats to stop going somewhere. I don’t want them to go. Is using something like either foil, which they hate to stand on, or a lot of places sell these little black plastic spiky things that don’t actually harm them but are pretty unpleasant. Problem is that then you can’t really use that area either. Sort of. I put some of the black spiky things around and entire section of my home office where I store things, so the cats would stop going around there to pee. For some reason they really liked to pee in a certain spots of my home office and I couldn’t get them to stop so I had to block off an area with A. Border of little black spikes. Than when I want to get something, I just temporarily move the roll of black spikes and go grab what I need and then lay it back down.
I also use those black Spike things in areas of my lawn that I’m trying to regrow sometimes. Because if there is a dirt spot in my lawn, the cats will use it as a litter box. So if I’m trying to regrow grass where there’s a dirt spot I have to put the spikes over there So the cats won’t go use it as a litter box and will allow new grass to finally grow there.
I also have tried several other things. There are cat mace sprays where you spray certain essential oils in an area you want the cats to avoid. But that’s a temporary solution if at all. I have tried automatic solar powered sirens using PIR sensors, but I’m afraid they probably annoy my neighbors too much and they don’t really distinguish the kind of animal and will go off for kids and adults too.
In our most recent house, we no longer allow our cats upstairs where the main kitchen is. Though one of the main reasons we don’t let them upstairs is so there is an area for guests who are allergic to cats to be at our house without having severe reactions. To some degree this includes myself since I’m allergic to all of our cats too. Lol
Then we also made a door for our basement kitchen and keep the cats locked out of there as well. Honestly, we kind of gave up assuming we could keep the cats off of the counters, so they basically just got banned from the kitchens entirely. That may not be a feasible or reasonable option for some people though. Sometimes kitchens are like a central point to get between two parts of the house And can’t as easily be blocked off for access to a cat.
I do wonder if you could set up your own type of squirt bottle that connects up to a smart plug, and then if you get a notification that the cat is on the counter while you’re away, you could press some kind of button to turn on the smart plug for a second or two and turn it back off just to have it automatically squirt some small spray at the counter. To train a cat, you don’t even have to have it happen every single time. In some ways, a variable schedule of conditioning is more effective than a fixed consequence. So if it happens sometimes but not every time they’re still going to avoid it.
I asked an AI for ideas about creating an automatic water spray deterrent and it gave some pretty cool ideas for electronic sprays that could be implemented with something like a smart plug or other switches, but most of those would require a little bit of DIY work. Apparently there is a common thing people use called PetSafe SSSCAT which uses a PIR sensor and sprays lightly to keep pets away from certain areas. Apparently a lot of people will get this and then modify it to trigger based off of their own separate smart automations. Also, if you don’t want it spraying when you are near, what you would do is connect it up to a smart plug that is turned off while you are home or nearby, and then you can set it up to turn on that plug whenever you leave the house. Which would then activate the spray to go off whenever the PIR sensor detects a cat up there.
Well, you see the thing with that is that both you and the preteen get a lot more enjoyment out of the interaction if it’s not automated and you are obviously responsible for manually spraying them.
Also, the heavier the spray the better and the colder the water the better. Source: spraying my kids, nibblings, neighbors with a cold water hose who come to my house to use my swimming pool and start a water flight by splashing me while I’m out of the pool.
Cold water hose nozzle on jet setting from a distance wins a water flight every time. Nobody can hold their breath under the warm water forever
Disclaimer: results may vary, It may make them more likely to continue the behavior because they usually like it and think it’s fun And want to make you do it again…
With some things, yes, and others no.
I trained my cats to give high fives, and dance, and they respond to a special “Come here” signal with my hands, they know clapping means leave to a different room, and a mouth sound I make means they can have a reward (treat for some cats, or back scratches for the ones that prefer that). They don’t scratch or bite people. They’re generally pretty good cats, but cats are like preteens and teenagers…sometimes “training” has limitations. I also helped resolve the issue by getting self-cleaning robotic cat litters that are low to the ground (some don’t like to have to “climb” up to use litter like with the expensive litter Robot 4 I have)…so, if I make it MORE convenient to use their litter box and it stays clean constantly, then they are fine with it, but some hate using litter that other cats use, and some will purposely go use EVERY litter (a territorial thing), but keeping the litter clean immediately and allowing them to go outside mostly solves the issue. It just helps to make other options more work or unpreferable.
if you have your camera where it can detect the cat do you also have a camera that has an alarm? just have the alarm go off every time the cat goes on the counter or table, not sure if it will work but worth a try.
If you have a camera that is capturing an area of concern, then what if you set up a Device & Service Trigger Automation so that when that camera detects a “Pet”, it turns on a Wyze Plug connected to a fan that blows at that area? With a single Trigger, your minimum time for the fan would be 1 minute on. If you add a second Automation, you could shorten the “on” time (e.g., IF Fan Plug “Has been on for 00:00:05” DO Fan Plug “Turn off”). That’s something I’d consider trying.
