This repo contains the code responsible for deploying and monitoring a raspberry pi zero powered camera to monitor my cat's water bowl
I had noticed on a couple of occasions that my cat had been desperate for something to drink, not realizing that her Petkit water bowl was actually completely dry. The only indication that the device provides is a small red led on the bottom of the bowl, and since the water pump runs intermittently, it's sometimes difficult to tell that it's running correctly. One at least one occasion, my cat has gone 24 hours without access to water, which is scary when I'm home, but potentially deadly if I'm away with no one checking in on her.
To solve this problem, I've set about creating an automated ML pipeline to monitor this waterbowl and notify me when it is empty
This repo contains all of the code responsible for deploying and running the camera service on a raspberry pi zero I have mounted under a shelf above my cat's water bowl.
Images taken by the camera are sent to an API running in my local K3S cluster, or are stored locally to forward later if the API is unavailable.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W powering the Arducam Camera is powered by a 10,000mAh UPS that can keep it running for 24 hours should the house lose power (this isn't really needed, but why engineer when you can over engineer).
The home lab powering this system is a 6 node Raspberry Pi 4 cluster, with an additional Raspberry Pi running a local GitLab instance for CI/CD. This repository is mirrored from my local GitLab.
This project was built using Python 3.9, and I've run it on Python 3.11, but your milage may vary.
If you wish to try running this code yourself create a virtual environment and run
pip3 install -r dev-requirementsPrepping the raspberry pi zero is more complicated, and I recommend following the steps provided here.
After that, the Ansible deploy script should be modified to match your destination host, rather than my internal DNS record.
Please feel free to fork this repository as you wish! As I said earlier, this repo is mirrored from a locally managed GitLab instance, so I can't accept PRs here. However, feel free to generate issues if you'd like, and we can discuss implementation ideas there.
This project is GNU GPL-3 licensed.
This part of the overall project is complete, with minor changes being made to tweak over time.