The Pet Sentinel

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App 1
App 2
Hardware
Tech Stack

Inspiration

This project came from my (Daniel) own experiences and the ups and downs of living with a cat. Ultimately, this project seeked to solve a problem in my own life: being too worried about the cat while at work.

What it does

The Pet Sentinel keeps you connected to your pet, ensuring their safety and your peace of mind.

How we built it

We built it using a raspberry pi 4 as a lightweight server. The server was written in python + fastAPI + opencv + ultralytics. The real time object detection is based on YOLOv9 and trained using a self-labelled dataset. The frontend mobile device is made with svelte-kit.

Challenges we ran into

We were extremely limited in hardware parts (literally nothing), and also had little experience with a raspberry pi (essentially none). We disassembled an old toy RC car for its motor to replace the servo. We also had no jumper wires so we tried soldering wires directly to the raspberry pi. It didn't work, we think it's because we used really cheap & low quality solder. We also tried disassembling an old laptop searching for wires (didn't work). In the end, we solved it by cutting off the wires of a fan that came with the Pi. It was then that we realized you couldn't attach s motor directly to a GPIO pin since the current is abysmally small even if the voltage isn't. We didn't have a transistor or anything, we were contemplating if we could get one from the dissasembled laptop but decided to just give up on the food dispensing function. Also we spent so much time on doing the Verbwire API integration when it turned out to be under maintenance...