Vera and pets (cat)?

Community Playground General Discussions
1

My wife has finally forced me to get a cat and I was wondering if I could somehow use this joyous occasion to buy more stuff for our smart home… :wink:

Does anyone here on the forum have a pet and use your Vera to track it? There is a bucketload of different products on the market, but very little information about implementing them to a smart home.

I would like some kind of GPS or presence device for the cats collar, so we can track it if lost (large house and we have already lost it a couple of times). Tile? Trackmycat.com? Pawtrack.com? Sticknfind.com?

Maybe with some kind of geofence or distance measuring so I could get a notification if the cat gets outside?

If it works I might get some for my kids… :wink:

2

Tile, all the way (small, lightweight, battery lasts for years, made specifically for geo-fencing applications). But nobody has made a plugin for it yet to integrate into Vera.

3

I have spent some time reading up on the Stick-N-Find (https://www.sticknfind.com/): Bluetooth 4.0, so I would propably need something like a Android tablet to act like a bridge to the Vera (with Tasker).

Tile (http://www.thetileapp.com/) seems nice but no replaceable battery! :S What do I get for this downside (the cost seems the same)?

4

I funded Bringrr, which has an open API. I’m not sure if Tile does not not, but I see that they only list the Apple App store on their site.

The additional benefit (besides replaceable battery) of Bringrr is that I can put the USB thing in our cars and it will let us know if we’re forgetting our phones. Otherwise I’m hoping that most of these bluetooth tags will pretty much all work the same.

I also like that Bringrr allows you “Scan” large areas using other people’s phones for an item. Obviously will only be effective if it’s widespread, but it’s nice to know if my dog got out, that i could put out an APB and it could notify me that my dog was last seen at location X at location Y. Some of the other tags may work the same way as well (I haven’t looked into them that much)

5

Tile works the same way, uses other Tile user’s phones to locate lost items.

While the Tile batteries aren’t replaceable, that was done on purpose to make it as thin as possible and it’s also waterproof. You could attach it to a collar and never worry where the pet might go and the tracker still function. It’s suppose to be a throwaway device which lasts a year and is recycleable.

6

I liked the idea of the bringer because they are similar except it is possible to open them to replace the battery, you just lose the waterproofing. So at that point you could repurpose it and get a new one if you needed the waterproofing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the tiles are the same way.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

7

Found that a Swedish store actually sold the SticknFind (http://www.netonnet.se/art/dator/larm-och-vervakning/hemautomatisering/SticknFind-Bluetoothstickers2PkBlk/195472.8060/). I usually have to order my smart home stuff from stores outside of Sweden so I jumped the bandwagon and bought a two-pack.

I am thinking one for the cat (as a tracking device) and the other one to try and use for presence. We have geofencing for our iPhones with iViri and IP ping sensoring, but the temporal resolution is still not quite satisfactory.

8

I see this topic is over a year old. Has anyone successfully integrated one of these trackers with the Vera system?
I would love to find out more on how you did it and how you are using it