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One-way cat airlock prevents kitties from bringing friends, dead or alive, into your home [1]

['Gail Sherman']

Date: 2025-06-26

The 2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Challenge winners have been announced, and they range from the most innovative to the most practical. From Fytó, which gamifies plant care, to TinyML meets dog training, which combines a remote dog feeder with machine learning for positive reinforcement-based dog training.

The three winners were all cat hacks. Cat Valve, a one-way cat airlock to prevent kitties from bringing friends, dead or alive, into your home, Cat Bowl Monitor, which uses facial recognition to feed multiple cats separately, and my favorite, Cat at the Door. Cat at the Door is a delightfully over-engineered system to alert you that your cat is home. It uses radar (!) and a Bluetooth low-energy collar tag to detect motion and then determine if the motion is one of your cats. The device sends an alert to a portable device that you can carry with you.

One of many projects that received honorable mention was Wall Street Hamster in the "Playful Pets" category. Using a small hamster wheel and a Raspberry Pi, Wall Street Hamster allows your hamster to trade stocks for you. I would be cautious about this particular one, however. This is clearly a gerbil, and I wouldn't trust a gerbil masquerading as a hamster with my stock portfolio. It's a super cute gerbil, though.

All the contest winners are worth checking out, and because makers are awesome, they all include instructions, links to 3D print files, and even troubleshooting guides in some cases.

The inventor of Cat at the Door provides some instructions in the readme on GitHub on where to begin.

Skim the manual once to get a general idea. Let it sit for a day—yes, really! Read it again more carefully. You'll then know exactly what to do next.

Good advice for starting any project.

Previously:

• Watch baby and dog at same time with this one weird clothesline trick

• Hack Your Dog's Brain

• Watch this fun nail-filing hack after doggo refuses to get them clipped (video)

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