Our kitties’ litterbox is in the basement, where I often forget about it. This monitor, in our kitchen, helps me remember to scoop it.
The 3D printed monitor is running on an ESP32 that queries Home Assistant for the number of visits to the box since the last cleaning. Recently cleaned litter lights up the CLEAR well, and increasingly dire situations are indicated with WASTE and BIOHZ. The voltometer on the right shows visits/10 for more detail. The right column shows the food and network status of our automated cat feeder (flashed with ESPHome and logging to HA) and the bottom right lamp shows if the console itself is connected to HA.
Telemetry from the litterbox itself comes from a super janky ESP8266 and a PIR sensor to count visits. (I experimented with collecting VOCs too, but sadly that’s a null result: there’s no correlation between number of visits and VOCs, but it’s possible the sensor has gotten kind of trashed by the hostile environment.) A reed switch on the door resets the count, and all of that gets logged to MQTT.
A super fun project, the SAF is high, and the kitties enjoy the frequent cleanings.