Mouse trap trigger email notification

[Red Squirrel]

I had mice in my attic last year and ended up rigging a camera and light so I can monitor the traps (pain in the butt going up there). I'm hoping that the flashing and other roof repairs I did this year will have blocked whatever hole they got into, but just in case I'll be putting more traps.

I decided to go with a different approach and have it send me an email when the traps trigger.



Basically this will connect to my arduino based environmental monitoring device that I made. So when the traps are active it completes the circuit, when they get deactivated it will break the circuit.

There will be an ethernet port on there and the cable that runs up the attic will have an Ethernet end so I can easily disconnect and bring the whole thing down to discard the bodies when I do catch any. Thought I'd share this interesting mouse trap concept. :biggrin:

 

[olds]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3YG8oq5ZDE

 

[Miramonti]

Awesome, I love it.

Drawbacks are with all that work, the musk d'human is probably all over it. And I hope that's not baited, can see for sure in the pic, but I'm not seeing much, lol.

I use clean baggies for gloves and mold part of a kraft single cheese slice (best eaten by rodents btw...) onto the trigger and always get the mice...and rats. Occassionally I've had to redo it if it dries out before being triggered.

 

[edro]

Awesome!

I want something similar for when animals are in my barns. (coons, groundhogs, opossums, etc)

 

[Red Squirrel]

In the pic there's no bait, but I'll add it when I put them up in the attic. I still need to run the cabling and finish coding the monitoring app which will be used for lot of other stuff around the house like water sensors etc. For now I can just use an ohm meter to check though so I'll probably be putting it up shortly.

 

[RossMAN]

http://forum.freetronics.com/viewtopic.php?t=1816&p=4170

 

[Stifko]

Awesome, I love it.

me too, it is freaking genius.

 

[Kreon]

I did something similar to this with the traps I put in my ceiling. I just hooked it up to a battery and an LED protruding from the ceiling linked to each trap. The LED turned on when the circuit was completed (I had to modify the traps a bit, put a piece of wire that made the connection when the trap was sprung). If I have to put traps up there again, the email is a brilliant move.

Do you have them in several separate locations? Do they all run to one Arduino?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I only have them in the one location. Last year I had 3 mice in my attic and I have no idea how they got in. Got lot of roof flashing related repairs done this summer so I hope that's how they were getting in and that it's now fixed. So it's more a precaution.

The 2 traps are in parallel so they both have to trip to break the circuit. I was going to make it so when they trip they complete the circuit rather than the opposite, but then I figured with constant power if a wire gets chewed or something, I'll know too. The arduino is something I setup as a monitoring device for lot of various sensors (don't have much on them now) and I'm still coding the app that polls it. The original idea was I needed something to detect if the power is out, and also read my battery voltages, and it kinda exploded into a full blown monitoring device. I should have gotten the "mega" actually. I can easily replace it in the future though if I actually manage to use all those pins.

Once I'm done coding my app I want to add various environmental sensors around the house such as fire detectors, water leak sensors, etc...

Everything connects on this DIN rail:



The device:




The equivalent commercial grade device cost's over a grand. I built that one for under 50 bucks. Well on it's own it's "dumb" but hooked up to the server running my software it will be equivalent to the commercial devices. I can code it to do what I want.

It's actually crossed my mind to take a server case, shove this inside, add the terminal blocks and make it a self contained device and sell it, but the logistics involved would probably be too much hassle.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I finally got around to pulling wire for this project. I've been checking it manually with the ohm meter for now.



Cable comes in from the server rack DIN terminal block, through the floor, up this conduit and to a terminal block. Yeah I know, that's an out of spec bend, but it really wont matter for basic low voltage non-data electrical.




Will have a cord going up to the attic with a RJ45 end so I can easily disconnect the trap array to bring it down for emptying. The trap array will consist of 6 traps in groups of 2. Undecided yet if I want to do series or parallel. In series I'll know right away if I caught a mouse while in parallel it could take a few mice before one set triggers.



The air conditioning unit that is being protected 24/7 by this high tech system.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I finally finished my mouse trap notification system.



In action, while testing...



In it's natural environment.

 

[stargazr]

Cool!

 

[0roo0roo]

http://revision3.com/tbhs
gotta get that guy on it, he'd probably build a wireless one which would dispose of the body automatically