Pet Locator/Monitor

[sforeman00]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this...

Has anyone tried tracking their pets throughout the house and yard in real time?

I was interested in putting some type of RF tag on my cats so that when they are in the house or outside I could track their position. I have looked at GPS but that is very expensive for 4 cats. I then looked at using RFID but that would get very expensive if I went further than 6" from the receiver.

Was looking at http://www.thecatlocator.com/ but not sure if it could be hooked up to a PC.

Ultimately I was thinking about using weblobby to have a Radar graphic w/floorplan that spins around and shows me the location of each cat in realtime. Similar to an airports radar.

If anyone has any ideas let me know.
Thanks.
Stan

 

[Rupp]

The long range RFID is about the least expensive method that I know of that will provide any distance but even this technology will not let you track locations only in range and out of range.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

That Cat Locator product looks pretty cool. You would have to hack it to get it to work. It outputs a DC voltage (shown via its meter) that could be connected to an analog to digital converter. The tricky part would be changing the channels for each pet.

I used an analog to digital converter in my garage door monitor project. You can not do this with MainLobby alone and would need something like HomeSeer to interface to the A/D converter. If your curious look at these How-To's/Guides:

http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=2827

http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=3184

Again, not sure just how feasible this would be to hack into. To bad they are so expensive as I woud love to purchase one and hack into it myself!