Tag Archives: cat

AI-powered cat door stops your feline companion from bringing home dead gifts

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Cats are notorious for many things, with curiosity at the top of that list. They can and will pounce on small critters, sometimes with undesirable consequences. If that wasn’t bad enough, cats that have owners have a tendency to bring home the spoils of war, whether for themselves or as a gift to their humans. Either way, those unwanted and unmoving critters are sure to create unhealthy and unsavory circumstances at home, often discovered only after the fact. At CES 2024, a rather curious solution is being presented, utilizing those hot AI powers to stop your cat from entering your abode until they finally let go of their lifeless package.

Designer: Flappie

Flappie wouldn’t be the first smart pet door to grace the market, but it is probably the first to be so laser-focused on a very specific use case. The fact that it needs to only pay attention to cats and a very specific scenario means its designers and developers can also pour resources only into things that matter. In this case, that means it’s only concerned about recognizing cats and whether they have prey in their mouths before entering your house.

Like other smart doors, Flappie has sensors, specifically a camera, facing the outside world. When your cat approaches, it uses AI to identify whether it’s bringing home prey or just some other inanimate object. If it indeed carrying some previously living thing, the smart door will won’t open up and prevent your cat from entering. Only when the cat has figured out that it can’t go in without dropping its payload first will the AI door finally let it have access and resume living in the safety and comfort of its indoor abode.

The idea for this kind of specialized security system is to hopefully train the cat to not bring in dead things (or other things) and drop them off at the door before coming in. It’s not a foolproof method, but one that the designers believe is more effective than manually monitoring the cat. They are confident that the AI has a 90% accuracy in identifying dead prey like mice, birds, and even snakes, and it will only get better as it learns over time.

Flappie also has other functions besides training your cat to be respectful when coming back home. Those same cameras can be used to capture your feline’s precious moments and even share them on social media. You could control it remotely via an app, but there are also manual controls in case things get a little out of hand. The smart door can also be connected to your cat’s chip, presuming it has one, so that it will only let your own cat in and keep curious strangers out.

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Tasteful & Functional Cat Tree Is Designed As An Excellent Alternative To Cheaply Made Cat Furniture

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For most of us, our pets aren’t simply pets! They’re our children and babies we consider our blood. We take care of them the way we would take care of our kids, and leave no stone unturned to ensure they are happy, healthy, and safe. If you’re looking for a new and improved way to take better care of your pet then you may want to look into Papuk’s CONNECT Collection by Vazken Karageozian.

Designer:Vazken Karageozian for PAPUK

Designed by Toronto-based interior designer Vazken Karageozian, the CONNECT Tree is an elegant and functional cat tree that is the ultimate haven for the kitties. Karageozian has two adorable felines himself – Grayson and Ella, and he decided to use his design talent to create something exceptional for his two favorite clients. As a result, Papuk which is Armenian for “soft and fluffy” was created.

The CONNECT Collection by Papuk offers a modular approach to the construction and design of a cat tree. It designs a cat tree as a multi-level system that can be personalized and customized with a bunch of attachable accessories, in turn creating a comfortable, cozy, and fun recreational activity for your cats, providing them with something else to do besides scratching and climbing your couch. The CONNECT Tree serves as the foundational element of the CONNECT system. It is the centerpiece of the multi-accessory system and is supported by other elements such as a scratching pad, cushion, tray platform, and hanging toy – which are available as a bundle or à la carte.

One of the designer’s motivations for creating the CONNECT Collection was the fact that most cheaply made cat furniture is disposed of in landfills owing to their poor and questionable construction and designs. The CONNECT Tree, on the other hand, features solid-ash dowels, ash-veneered plywood shelves, and accessories that can be added using genuine leather straps. The CONNECT Tree is designed by Vazken Karageozian as a solution that offers “inter-species happiness”, which is often found lacking in the pet product category.

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This Hand-Made Portable Radar Detects Black Cats for Your Convenience

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Who doesn’t love black cats? The answer: those of us who value our luck. It’s common knowledge amongst the superstitious that the presence of black cats can only precede a string of misfortunes… depending on where you live. Some cultures consider them good luck, whereas others disagree. Regardless of your opinion on the, shall I say, aetheric attunement of black cats, you’ll want to take a look at this clever hand-held radar created by Kinky Kashayam — a small team of industrial and creative designers based in New York City and Toronto. Called the “Portable Black Cat Radar,” or the “BCR” for short, this rather unusual project is part of a series of conceptual inventions the team has dubbed “Machines that Respond to Superstitions”.

Designer: Shashwath Santosh, Nithin Eluvathingal (via Kinky Kashayam)

According to Kinky Kashayam, “Many of us have encountered the ideology that crossing the path of a black cat will bring calculated misfortune. If only there were a machine that could show you all the black cats in your vicinity, so you could avoid crossing their paths and protect your luck.”

The parallel childhood experiences of the founders — who’d both developed their own thorough distrust of black cats for different, albeit similar reasons — formed the project’s innermost inspirations. Recalling the incidents of their youth to Yanko Design, black cats crossing their paths seemed the likeliest culprits behind a strange encounter at an airport and less-than-stellar grades on a final exam. Developing the Portable Black Cat Radar together has essentially become the Kinky Kashayam team’s way of reconnecting with their childhood imaginations while tinkering with advanced gadgetry — and, as unconventional as it may seem, this really does work like a radar of sorts.

Indeed, the existing Portable Black Cat Radar prototype is packing some interesting stuff. Its custom-printed red circuit board is sandwiched between see-through acrylic plates, containing a GPS, gyroscope, and magnetometer. Those are all necessary to project the user onto a virtual map relying on real coordinates to feed it live information — in fact, the radar’s built-in software works much like a Niantic game, like Pokémon Go. The display on the center of the radar shows the user’s location while “fictional black cats” appear as encounters on the aforementioned virtual map, and it sounds like there’s a gameplay element behind the user’s choice to avoid or interact with them.

While there’s no production schedule in place yet, it sounds like this is due to change soon; a few devices could get produced and distributed through the studio’s social media channels. Whether or not a final model of the Portable Black Cat Radar will be able to truly detect any real black cats is another matter altogether, though it’s unlikely — unless, perhaps, the BCR is reconfigured to look for microchips or RFID tags.

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