My cat was missing for a few days about a month ago. It was really stressful. Currently, I’ve put an AirTag on her which works okay since she’s an outdoor cat but I still get paranoid when FindMy hasn’t updated in a while. I would really love to support this project!
Our cat once disappeared for a week and we still have no idea where he has been. We have already said good bye since we presumed it got caught by a fox or some other predator. Returned exactly 7 days later as nothing happened, in good shape, not particularly hungry, nor dirty. Go figure!
Some cats have multiple houses. Lots of people love cats, and if a cat starts frequenting their houses, they will start feeding them and kind of adopting them. Cat lives in the new house for a few days, then go back to original house, stay for a while, and go to the second house, and so on.
We considered this option, and since we live in a remote countryside, we actually asked the neighbors around in few km radius. None knew anything. Mystery still unsolved. Happened only once.
Probably stuck in a shed, barn or other outbuilding that is infrequently used by the owner. Cat goes in while door is open, sleeps, resident leaves and closes door, cat is now stuck. The cat however will hear an approaching human and rush the door when it's opened next.
It happens to cats all the time when you live near farms, you either get used to it or learn to keep your cat indoor.
(If you only ever 'adopt' stray cats, it's a reasonable coping strategy to consider their presence somewhat ephemeral)
Happens to mine all the time! I figured a while back that he was just staying on the outdoor bench of a neighbor, and he had access to the food of her cats.
One of my cats almost killed himself when he tried to remove the flea collar, and those are supposed to break. No, it didn't. Luckily, I was around and managed to cut the damn thing before it would suffocate my cat.
Never ever will I put anything artificial on a cat again, far too dangerous.
Harnesses would be just as bad, perhaps worse, for outdoor free roaming cats. The risk is that they get caught on a tree or fence and fail to release themselves. Alway use a collar designed to snap open when snagged.
Looks really good, and I'm happy there's an open source version of this. With that said, who's going to put such a big gadget around their cats' neck? I'm envisioning a cat getting stuck by that collar somewhere and suffocating. I think in its current version its better for big dogs
Still I hope to see new and improved iteration of it!
They’re pretty tiny. “Mr Lee CatTrack" did this in 2014 with little more than a SIM card and a gps, which was small. This one doesn’t seem much bigger.
Back in 2012 I was using a Zoombak for my cats, which was designed for dogs. Eventually one of them started getting less and less fur under his collar because the Zoombak was wiggling back and forth as he was running, causing the collar to chafe.
He didn’t seem to mind it though, and eventually he’d recognize my car as I drove to pick him up. He’d jump into the back seat like a dog right when the door opened. I miss that fella.
For a traditional cat collar, you might have an engraved nametag the size of a quarter. Even an apple airtag is clunky in comparison - and this thing looks several times the size of an airtag.
It's impressively small for something with LTE, and a multi-month battery life, it's just a lot bigger than a quarter.
Cat collars getting stuck can be a problem regardless of a bulky item being attached (though, it will probably be exacerbated by a tracker), so a breakaway/quick-release collar is a good idea in any case.
This is (unfortunately) very, very true. I don't have firsthand experience, thankfully, but 2x secondhand experience, and I cannot think about those two cases without getting tears in my eyes. It's not common, but uncommon things happen all the time in large populations.
Love this project, although it makes me even more frustrated about how bad the pet-tracking business is right now. If you search for pet trackers on Amazon, it’s all these pesky devices with awkward shapes, high subscription costs and bad battery life. It’s pretty bad.
I currently rely on an AirTag, and for the most part it’s great as long as someone’s iPhone is nearby. However, I’m missing that GPS component.
I’d pay for this as I currently don’t have the time to build it nor the experience in building PCBs. Could be a fun project at some point, though.
I burnt myself once when I didn't do enough research and bought whatever was first in the Google search results.
Turned out to be a scam with legal address in farm in UK. Collar came but it was extremely poor quality, didn't match pics on the website, app was crap, GPS was not really working (it felt that it is tracking my phone's GPS that usually is off).
Yeah, it is thanks to the choice of a hybrid location service : at home it's only a few BLE packets and no 4G, but as soon the tracker is outside it's back to the hungry GPS chip and 4G data.
You cannot expect a 4G + GPS to have a long battery life.
We are using tractive for our cat. He is fairly active and the battery last around 2 days. Not awesome but also not that bad for the increased comfort that we know where he is.
With the collar that comes with it, he loses it every couple of weeks usually nearby bushes but we always find it and everything is good to go from there.
When I went down the rabbit hole of looking into pet trackers, the fact an iPhone needs to be nearby for AirTags to work is a problem to me, as well as the need for a SIM card in the tracker itself. I was thinking it could be nice to use a Zigbee type RF tranceiver as the range can be pretty fantastic [1] and they're very low power, and perhaps the base stations could forward messages they each received to each other to create a mesh across a neighbourhood to track far roaming cats. This wouldn't work for cats that go _really_ far (some can go several km in one day/night) but would for cats that only go a block or two. And the mesh could be used for any other item tracking needs too.
It's definitely on the expensive side, but the form factor on the newer fi collar model is _much_ better than before (important for me, having a small dog). Battery life is about as good (it dropped ~3-5% with a dogsitter as I was away for a week).
I was looking for a similar service to keep track of my wallet because I lost it a few months ago. I ran into all the same problems you mentioned. It blew my mind that I couldn't find a small device that took a sim card and just transmitted its location. I ended up tying my wallet to my backpack.
This cat tracker might just free my wallet from its paracord prison.
Important to note that this fellow has already published detailed engineering notes, BOMs, all of the gerbers. I believe this really matters when taking this to KickStarter, which is exactly what he should do.
One thing to consider is that many animals will not wear collars. However, they might wear a well-designed harness.
I came to write the same. I live in Thailand in a place with tons of jungle. It is common around here that cats die due to getting stuck in a tight spot because of the collar. I personally lost my first cat due to this. Now i am aware and will never put a collar on a cat if it hasn't got quick release. Such a horrible way to die. Quick release is for me a hard requirement.
Of course you could add a quick release/stretchy part to the collar so it is safe, but that also means that the tracker would easily get lost (especially if the cat isnt used to collars since kittenhood, they tend to be too annoyed by them and try to remove them)
You're right, partially. Yes, you can track the tracker itself and go to that location. But that location might be inaccessible to humans, or the cat might drop the tracker somewhere where it gets unusable, say a bit of water for example.
Also, whats the point of a tracker if its not on the cat?
It's better that it "malfunction" and fall up by mistake than not falling off when needed.
If it do falls off (by mistake or because the quick release did its intended job), at least you now have a good starting point where to go search for the cat. Assuming it doesn't fall off the very first day, you might also have a good idea or sense of in which area the cats normally goes strolling due to the tracking feature.
It's a numbers game. A tabcat used to be £16 to replace the tracker, if you always replace, and they don't lose it that frequently, then it's highly likely that they'll have it in case of emergency. This device is probably more expensive to replace (and unfortunately the tabcat is now £60 to replace, although you do get two trackers for that cost)
> Also, what's the point of a tracker if it's not on the cat?
Well, if your cat is one that tolerates a collar most of the time, he'll have the tracker on most of the time, which is better than no tracking at all. One of our cats tolerates a collar without any problem.
> or the cat might drop the tracker somewhere where it gets unusable, say a bit of water for example.
The dog GPS collars made by e.g. Whistle are waterproof, IPX8.
You might not get a cell signal under a couple of feet of water, but that much water also means you probably aren't finding the gadget even if you have a recent GPS fix.
Have cats with a tabcat each. The safety collar comes off a couple of times a year, once or twice it's been inaccessible - neighbour won't let you in and cant find it themselves, on a roof, etc.
For those worried about collars, I can confirm that https://www.coolcatcollars.co.uk collars do come off. You can also use a luggage scale to measure the force it takes to release.
I mean, if you're concerned about the cat's health, keeping it indoors (or in a cat patio) is probably going to reduce the risks to the cats health way more than skipping a collar will, and you won't need a collar.
In some cases it is the opposite...but I guess you think you should be put under house arrest for your mental health too. There are so many dangers outside.
For an indoor outdoor-occasionally GPS-tracked cat, collars are fine. There is no case where they will get themselves into trouble and be unaccompanied to ruin.
I had issues as well and reached out to their support they provided me with detailed graphs of the battery usage over time and when the cat was in the wifi zone where it does seem to turn off the gps as well as mobile network to safe energy.
I adjusted my wifi to cover a bit more of my garden area and since then battery life has increased to 2-3 days.
This is great. Looks a tad big, would be good to know it's measurements
The main missing thing from this is waterproof design. Doesn't need to survive immersion (unless you have a Turkish Van) but it will get damp as the cat pushes through wet undergrowth or if the cat gets caught by a sudden shower.
Main things would be an ip67 rated usb connector, and a channel for rubber seal along the case join.
(edited to add)
From the STL, this is much bigger than a tabcat. The tabcat is 23x33x12mm in its silicone cover. This is ~27x60x13mm.
Another handy feaure of the tabcat (although not essential) is a beeper.
People reporting on missing cats and such. The solution is simple: keep the indoors. That is the responsible thing to do. Cats are highly destructive to native fauna, they can get injured, die, breed, pick up parasites, or catch communicable diseases that may be incurable.
Why is this getting downvoted? Indoor cats always have a longer lifespan than outdoors. It is the right thing to keep cats indoors but provide plenty of indoor play & stimulation to keep them active.
It's getting downvoted because this varies hugely by location. In the UK, the life expectancy is not that different, there are no large predators, so the consensus of cat owners is that cats life richer lives if let out. If you live in the US your cat could be eaten by a mountain lion or coyote.
This is pretty much the same attitude which leads to kids being wrapped in cotton wool, ferried everywhere in giant SUVs and never let outside to play. I find it a bit sad.
dude, it isn't a giant SUV divers that are advocating for indoor cats. they are the same people that hold onto the whimsy that "cats a natural and belong outdoors! :)"
It’s not as “simple” as gp suggests, nor is it “the right thing”. We really don’t know what psychological and qol differences there are between the two… we’ve never been able to ask the cats. There are trade-offs, life expectancy being only one dimension of it. And in both cases (like the play you mention) there are mitigations to the downsides.
Source: I’ve had both indoor and outdoor cats, including cats that transitioned to outdoor after being raised indoor.
Lost one outdoor cat tragically in middle of his lifespan. But his equally-outdoor brother lived to 19, and all the outdoor cats hands down seemed happier on average (less lethargic, less neurotic, less obsessive, less overeating).
I keep my cat in a locked closet, and she is coming up on 267 years, still going strong! I used to hear her playing in there, but nowadays she's much more quiet.
Cats are native fauna in some places. If it’s not suitable for a cat to go outdoors where you live, maybe just don’t get a cat in the first place. Same for dogs, children, horses etc.
While cats are native in some places, evolutionary mechanisms stop working when a predator has an unlimited supply of food supplied by humans. The problem of cats nowadays isn't their existence, but that the amount of cats per square meter is more than the ecosystem can support. Usually this would easily balance out by the predator dying. But with humans feeding cats, they can rampage the ecosystem until it's destroyed without checks and balances. Feeding a predator and letting it outside is never suitable.
...what places? Cats (and dogs, and horses) are domesticated animals. They aren't "native" anywhere the same way a wild species is, they were bred by humans.
What point do you think I am trying to make, exactly? Native fauna is defined as animals which historically have naturally occurred in the local area [1], and wild cats are by definition native fauna in Scotland, and across much of Europe.
You are letting your very obvious personal bias determine your interpretation of what is an objective fact.
It's a faulty comparison, though. Domestic cats are by definition not the same as any native cat. They are domesticated animals, more equivalent to dogs, cows, and chickens.
So the discussion to have here is 'do we accept having domesticated animals in environments they didn't originate from'.
It is in no way a faulty comparison. We did not domesticate cats in the same way that we did dogs, cows or chickens [1]. Wild cats found human populations useful because they attracted rodents. Humans found cats useful because dealt with rodents. A mutually beneficial relationship lasting thousands of years during which time, cats essentially domesticated themselves.
Domesticated animals are different species than native flora and fauna. The domestic cat is taxonomically and genetically not the same as a any wild cat. The same goes for dogs, cattle, etc.
By definition, domestic animals and plants have no native home except with humans. This is why we call domestic cats who escape and live in the wild "feral," not "wild," because a feral animal is specifically a domestic animal not living with humans, not a non-domestic native animal. It does not matter whether they 'domesticated themselves' or not, they are a domestic species and therefore not equatable with a wild one.
As a result, your point simply makes no sense. Domestic cats have no 'native lands' because they are not and cannot be 'native' anywhere except in human settlements.
Did you actually read the article I linked to? I ask because actual evolutionary geneticists don't agree with you, and I'm likely to side with them on the genetics of the matter.
from the looks of it, you found an inkling of confirmation and rolled with it. you think you got a science backing for your ideas, but nah, wrong. remind yourself when you read all the articles claiming "near identical DNA!" that human DNA is ~1.6% different from gorilla DNA. geneticists are seeing larger differences between domestic and wild cat species.
> Can you point out the part of the article that disagrees with the assertion "cats are domestic animals"?
This is neither relevant nor the issue being discussed. It is a straw man, and you all too well know this. No one has at any point claimed that there are not domestic cats.
The entire point made was that cats are a native species in many parts of Europe, and that research shows not only that cats domesticated themselves, but that domestic and wild cats are genetically almost identical. The fact that domestic cats exist does not prevent native wild cats from also existing.
The lack of birds in the small town where my parents live, and dozens of semi-feral cats roam, is always rather unsettling. Meanwhile the parks in a city two orders of magnitude larger are bustling with activity, since the life expectancy of an outdoor cat here is close to zero.
Agreed as a cat person people should keep their cats indoors. It's better for the cat & better for the environment. Every outdoor childhood cat I had got hit by a car or ran away. None lived much past 5. My parents started to keep cats indoors and they lived 10..15+ years.
That said, this product looks like it can help people who lose their indoor cats, which happens. I recently helped rescue a neighbors cat who snuck out and stayed outside for 2 full months.
Weird how nobody mentions that you can actually walk your cat - it's very different from walking a dog, but completely doable.
Over time you can get rid of the leash and just walk side by side.
My cat was 10 when we moved to a ground floor apartment, so we couldn't realistically prevent him from escaping, so we started walking him. He lived over 16 years, the last two of which he would only go outside to lay in the bushes.
Do you think maybe by making sure that generations of cats never experience the outdoors, perhaps you are breeding them to not know how to deal with the outdoors whenever they do get out?
Deer, possums, raccoons, and other wildlife who live outdoors seem incapable of learning how to avoid it, so it's unclear my cat will either.
Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
> Deer, possums, raccoons, and other wildlife who live outdoors seem incapable of learning how to avoid it, so it's unclear my cat will either.
Or, you only notice the ones which have been killed. Otherwise, deer, possum and raccoon populations should decrease pretty fast. And of feral cats of course.
> Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
I'm sorry to hear that, but I am curious why it was only the male cats. Perhaps they are less skittish? What happened to the female cats?
> So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
Alright, but I would hope you can at least agree that keeping cats indoors all the time is not preparing them for the outdoors, in the cases when they do slip out.
What don't you do the same, stay indoor, humans too are highly destructive to fauna, they can get injured, die, breed, pick up parasites, or catch communicable diseases that may be incurable.
All animals should be free, if you can't provide freedom to your animals then you should not have any.
I genuinely don't understand why you feel the same rules ought to apply to humans and non-sapient animals, especially animals introduced into an environment by humans.
What about the fact that animals introduced to an environment by humans in the name of "freedom" cause disproportionate harm to other animals? Whose freedom wins?
It's the same as cigarets, you know it's toxic to you and others but still you want it regardless.
PS: I love cats and always had one until few years back but I don't want to have one to force him to stay indoor, as long as I don't have a place for it to go out I won't get any.
You are making an obtuse argument. You do realise pets are introduced species in many parts of the world, and actually end up being significant pests, right? Predatory pets like cats are especially destructive in most ecosystems, many small native species are vulnerable and end up being endangered, because they have not evolved a defence strategy against them. Places like Australia has a huge problem because of it.
Again, keep your cat indoors. Otherwise, you're part of the problem.
It's not an obtuse argument. People value different things. You listed a bunch of things you value (lifespan of cat, not killing lots of birds, etc) but other people are uncomfortable preventing their cat that wants to go outside from going outside. They're weighing their cat's own preferences over the things you value and reasonable people can disagree over questions like this.
It is an obtuse argument. Because they identify themselves in what I said earlier, got defensive about it, and then resorted to mental gymnastics in an attempt to absolve responsibility for the harm caused by their own pets.
I understand where you're coming from, as they can be highly destructive and are to be blamed for some species on Pacific Islands going extinct! The humans who brought cats to such fragile ecosystems are clearly to blame.
By and large, domestic US outdoor cats are not in fragile ecosystems, but they are the number one killer of birds. They roam outside along with other species (like squirrels and crows) that have had to adapt to the insane environment humans have developed.
I've always seen my pets as persons, with feeling and moods. Trapping them inside is cruel. Cats in nature are adapted to roam and explore.
My cat in the US regretably, has brought home a few birds, but all of the birds were species of least concern. Fortunately, there are a lot of cheap collars owners can use to help alert the bird of the cat's presence before predation occurs.
Your cat doesn't know which species are of least concern, and you certainly aren't seeing every bird or small mammal or reptile your cat kills for fun.
I recently took a course on ornithology and was stunned by how difficult a bird's life is from the migrations, predations, building collisions, and the sheer amount of work they invest in nesting and raising their young. It's easy to take them for granted until you actually understand what they go through just to exist, unlike a pampered cat who gets to kill for sport.
Cat owners who allow their cats outdoors are being cruel to birds and small animals, period. A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference. There's no way to wiggle out of this moral dilemma. If you love nature and want it balanced and protected, then keep your cat indoors. Or, if you can, train your cat to kill only invasive species.
> Your cat doesn't know which species are of least concern, and you certainly aren't seeing every bird or small mammal or reptile your cat kills for fun.
Of course they don't know which is of least concern, but by and large I do see everything they kill because they bring it home and I have to clean it up. It is in their nature to bring it home.
> A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference.
There's barely any species of concern in urban environments anymore, because:
* Industrial run-off
* Habitat destruction
* Roads and highways with vehicles
* Air pollution
* Light pollution
* Poisons
* Electrocution from power lines
* Buildings with glass (actual a #2 killer of birds!)
* Hunting (both legal and illegal)
Domestic cats are merely a cherry on top of the myriad of environmental mistakes humans have made in the name of progress.
They are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
If you truly care about birds I would urge you to:
* stop driving
* use no lights past dusk
* not use or consume any product that contributes to air pollution
* not use any power grid that uses power lines
* not use any building with glass
* not consume any poultry
You forget that cats aren't always 100% in their kill rates. They also maim many critters who die sooner or later from their injuries.
So while you pet and play with Fluffy that evening, the mother bird she maimed earlier that day can no longer make ~100 trips a day to feed its hatchings. She tries, but can only manage a dozen or so trips. They slowly starve over the next few days despite the mother's desperate attempts.
That bird survived all the other leading causes of bird mortality, but not Fluffy. And Fluffy gets a few more bonus kills when the hatchlings expire.
I'm curious what would you do if people had a new breed of small domesticated dog that is efficient at killing outdoor cats, and those people let that dog roam like a cat?
Given that your cat is out there doing his thing, this new breed of outdoor dog is also out there doing his thing. As you said, they are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
His owners think he's a person. It would be cruel to lock him up all day.
But one of these dogs swiftly kills your outdoor cat. And your next cat. In fact, they're becoming the leading cause of death among outdoor cats, seconded only by cars.
Would you a) demand that dog breed not be allowed to roam because it harms cats, b) keep your next cat indoors, or c) ?
1. those collars don't work. birds didn't evolve alongside cat w/ flashy collars, so it doesn't always trigger flee instinct
2. if your cat wants to go outdoors, you can leash them like any dog-owner is required to do. the whole "cats need to be in nature" argument is rooted in the assumption that you as the owner aren't involved in that nourishment. if you can't be a responsible cat owner (keeping it from roaming on it's own; keeping it stimulated) then don't get a pet. is the cat really a critical unit of your family if you skirt responsibility and are okay w/ it dying violently outside?
3. the US is very much a fragile ecosystem. source on it not being? we, like many other place, have had a huge and trending decline in biodiversity.
4. cats haven't adapted to the human environment; we've developed technology and laws that have protected cats in our human environment. i'm not sure how they've had to adapt as they can interact with humans safely.
5. you don't see everything your cat kills. you may be able to placate yourself that your cat isn't one of the "rampant killers", but that thought isn't based solely on fact.
You're the one who decide to take an animal as a pet, knowing all the damage it can do to the environment. If you're fine with it then that's ok for you but you can't force your pet to be in prison because you don't want it to kill other species, if that's the case then you should not consider getting one in the first place.
Would you want to live in a cage your whole life? Then why do you want to do it to others?
Never heard of the Golden Rule: "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you"?
I understand your point of view, I share it, cats are deadly to many smaller species that's why if you're against that then you shouldn't get a cat at all.
PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
Oh please, cats are perfectly fine indoors if they are raised that way. There are solutions, like building a catio, indoor platforms and so forth. You can even train them for walking on a leash in a park. If there is a will there is a way. But people are lazy and pretend letting cats out is not a problem.
And if you are living in a shoebox yourself, where you regard your own home as a "prison" or a "cage", then you have no business keeping such a pet anyway.
> PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason.
Indeed I guess it depends of the size of the house.
> Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason.
I didn't know about the domestic one.
> cats are deadly to many smaller species that's why if you're against that then you shouldn't get a cat at all.
Many people who have cats do so by adoption of strays found in their area so not getting a cat is the same as letting a cat roam free in that area without a safe space and consistent food source.
The whole "prisoner" argument seems so dumb to me when we've already decided as a society that it's in the best interests of society to neuter/spay as many cats and dogs as possible to prevent an explosion in the stray population. Do you think we shouldn't do that because you wouldn't neuter/spay yourself?
I've only been into cat discourse for a few months but in my experience it's almost a guarantee that someone will make the "humans are the real invasive species" argument to defend letting their cat out
Or even better provide them a large outdoor catio / enclosure. Opportunity to play and access to a stimulating environment are so valuable for cat well-being.
In a lot of ways cat's are still in the early phases of domestication and the concept of keeping them indoors only is rather new.
Whataboutism doesn't change the fact feral cats, or domestic cats going feral are significant pests in many parts of the world. My argument is about advocating responsible pet ownership of small predators that can easily stray and become an environmental problem.
This shouldn't be for cats only, but a general OSS GPS tracker for vehicles too (I know it can be used for that), lots of people from home-assistant community will be interested in it.
But vehicles don't need the indoor tracking, or the home base station, and when moving have nigh-unlimited battery power available.
So I imagine it depends on how much those features are adding to the price. Also, it looks like the device isn't commercially available, and with BGAs etc it's not easy to DIY either.
Yes, this is mostly a solved problem for vehicles. I have a tracker in my car that does not even connect to the electrical system. It is a somewhat bulky brick with a battery that lasts 4–6 months. Smaller units are available, trading off battery life for size.
The cost of the device is less than $100, excluding the cellular data cost.
Once again bunch armchair neckbeards downvoting and trolling people fully based on opinion.
As a multiple cat owner with decades of experience and someone who has rescued many cats off the street in NY(T&R because yes its not good to have hundreds of strays per block), you downvoters have zero context here and your comments have been nothing but opinions.
Heres a super simple usecase that can shut you all up. People have indoor cats escape! This is traumatizing to owners, like a family member being abducted. It can go on for months and yes, people find their pets (we did), at great cost and burden.
And before you go claiming irresponsibility, this happen to us when someone broken into our unit. So fuck off please.
There is research on how indoor cars live happier healthier lives that are yes 10x longer, because outdoor cats literally die at 1 and 2 years old (they are adults) and indoor cats live to be 20+
Sad that a vitriolic rant with zero technical discussion is the top post. This is hacker news, not whinging news.
I think the design is too big and the battery life too uncompelling but open source means better luck at being improved. Amazon sells a lot of bunk as I’ve tried a few and only had luck with jiobit. I’d like to tinker with this.
Actually agreed. I work in hardware and have given people all the same feedback to the question/realization that "my pets chip is not a tracker"... Its not practical to attach this to pet.
And PS, I like to rant at hacker news, the community is so boring otherwise.
I find it sometimes genuinely upsetting to see the negativity in some comments. Different views are cool and for some people something might seem more obvious to them than to others, but there's a way to share without tearing down. Constructive feedback is one thing but no need to be negative for the sake of being negative
I have had my indoor cats get out before, it sucks. I currently have AirTags on their collars but something like this with real gps would be way better.
Ours didn’t used to, but when we hired someone to watch them while on vacation we realized it was a good idea. They could get out due to carelessness, or a broken window screen. They could also end up out and alone in the confusion of something like a house fire.
A lot of people with indoor cats also leash train them.
3/4 of mine have collars with RFID tags on them to control how much food they get from the automated feeder. They didn't care for them too much at first, but they quickly learned that it was their meal ticket.
The fourth cat doesn't have one because she can't eat kibble without it causing urinary problems.
> outdoor cats literally die at 1 and 2 years old (they are adults) and indoor cats live to be 20+
Where do you live? We had outdoor cats live until they were 19 and 17, both passed from age-related illness. Relatively calm neighborhood away from any heavy traffic, granted; but still.
There seem to be large cultural differences and they have their reasons.
For one, the average area of a house in the USA seems to be above 2000 square feet, whereas here in the UK it's more like 750 or so.
It feels worse for the animal to be cramped in a tiny space all their life, so we let them outside. Also there are no predators apart from the occasional domesticated dog, so it's safer. The biggest risk is traffic, which is dependent on where you live.
The bird thing brought up every time is weird to me, because no one seems to care about birds until cats are part of the conversation, suddenly birds are the most important part of the ecosystem.
We learn new things over time. Birds are wildly important to the world's ecosystems. House cats, not so much. They're more useful to humans in keeping rodents away from our food but that's not as necessary these days.
The supposed impact on bird life seems possibly quite overstated. Extensive personal experience suggests that (at least the cats that select me to live with) do not catch many birds at all.
Of the current cat with free-ish outdoor access: Last year birds accounted for 3.6 percent of all recorded catches (5/138). This year birds are 1.7 percent of all recorded catches (1/58). And all of the birds I've seen caught first knocked themselves out striking windows, or flew inside the house via open door and injured themselves trying to escape in panic. The healthy ones don't let cats near them at all.
Of the prior cat, zero birds over 9 years. Of the cat before that, maybe 1 or 2 birds over 18 years.
Of course anecdotes aren't data etc, but, the impact of data is its story, and anecdotes direct and constrain the collection and analysis of data.
how are you going to be like "my anecdote is actually important" with an N of magnitude 100. long-term and wide-scale research and monitoring has tracked millions of birds and have used models to extrapolate to the billions. your comment means little more than nothing. have you considered you haven't seen the extent of what the roaming cat has killed? it won't always bring it back to you. and why is it that the non-bird animals aren't important? biodiversity reduction, not just birds. and you think that even if they are sick or injured catches that your cat isn't impacting the other animals? you realize other animals gotta eat? if they can't b/c your cat takes it, or worst infects it with a parasite by chomping on it, your local predators are gonna suffer.
I grew up on a farm (which my brother now owns). So my anecdata spans from roughly 1980 until today. The farm cats tended to have two very different life spans. The short lived ones died within their first 3 years. The long lived ones lived 16 years or longer. With most bunched up around 18-20 years and the oldest two living to 25 and 27 years.
We've had no cats that lived between 3 and 16 years.
I have no idea why. To some degree you could get a sense which category a cat was in within the first year or so.
If I were to guess I think a cat will probably have a shorter life span in a city. More cars and more opportunities to get infected with diseases from other cats.
I live in a rural area with indoor/outdoor cats and I've seen that too, honestly it feels like a pretty classic bathtub curve, or that curve showing experience vs survival whose name I'm spacing on, the one with the dangerous "knowing just enough to be overconfident and kill themselves" valley. Some cats are inherently more cautious, but in general over the decades my observation has been that in general cats are like humans who engage in risky but rewarding behavior be it work (factory, or devops for that matter cough) or sports such as rock climbing or kayaking. When someone (or some cat) is absolutely brand new to the world, nearly everyone is very careful. Then they grow in comfort and experience, having learned a lot of the basic ropes, and in turn get more and more confident. But they haven't had their first crisis yet. Eventually comes the inflection point, where overconfidence leads to some sort of life/death (or losing the production database and holy shit are you fucked) moment with a rare event.
Those cats (or people) who make it through that crisis will gain some hard humility forever more and seem to go on for a long time after. Those who don't, well, obviously that's it. I had two big male cats back in the 90s, who being tough young males naturally once they got to 2-3 years old felt pretty confident. First of them sadly vanished and never saw him again. The second a few years later got into some fight or flight with/from something, I don't know what, but there were shrieks. But he escaped/fought and I found him. Forever after he was very careful, he'd go out the door onto the porch and whereas before he'd just instantly head off, after he'd immediately sit down and observe/listen for a good long while first. He lived to 21 years old. Another outdoor/indoor lived to 19.
It is truly hard to take the risk, but they're so much happier for it. We all reach the same end in the end, so I feel very strongly that there are limits to how far one should take "being safe". And there are good ways to massively reduce the bird issue. I love birds as well, but 3-5 caught per year when I'm feeding and support orders of magnitude more birds than that seems acceptable.
If cats escape from their house, either the owners behave like royal a-holes with them, or very likely they were not spayed/neutered. I'm sorry for some self defined animal lovers, but by not spaying/neutering a domestic cat they're actually harming it, in a very cruel way. Cats aren't people: many times during their life they feel the absolute urge to reproduce and cannot fight against this need with reasoning like humans because it's purely an instinct that can become stressful and very dangerous for their physical and mental health if not satisfied.
I've had family members who were against spaying/neutering and had all their cats escape, even multiple times by throwing themselves off the balcony (2nd floor luckily, they all survived), and all of them eventually developed very aggressive behavior against humans although they definitely were house cats.
All my cats (all neutered) never tried to escape from our old city apartment, aside the obvious exploring the hall beyond the house door, and now that we live in a small town in a cottage with garden and trees my two cats both enjoy wandering around the property, but they eventually come home for the night. It wasn't that easy: they had to fight for territory since this property has been kept empty for years so that it was easily taken by the neighborhood cats, but so far it looks like our cats won.
> If cats escape from their house, either the owners behave like royal a-holes with them, or very likely they were not spayed/neutered.
Hard disagree here. All four of my cats are spayed or neutered and the one is determined to go out and explore. She will sneak behind your back and fly through the door as it closes. She looks peaceful and sleeping across the room, but don't let that fool you -- she springs to life and flies out the door when you least expect it.
She once escaped through a basement window, about 6 feet above the floor with no objects below it, through a gap which was just a few inches wide. I got her back about three days later by setting up a motion activated camera and a bowl of food outside.
I've fostered over 50 cats now so I feel like I know and understand their behavior pretty well by this point.
> All four of my cats are spayed or neutered and the one is determined to go out and explore.
We don't disagree here, I never wrote that neutered/spayed cats don't want to explore, that's normal behavior for every feline out there, but that those who aren't can suffer a lot from being forced home. For cats which aren't spayed or neutered it isn't just about exploring anymore but satisfying their urge to mate, and they won't return until that need is satisfied, if they do.
I'd be super-interested in buying this hardware. A few thoughts:
1) One of our (indoor, house) cats is always keen to escape, and as such currently wears a breakaway collar with an Airtag attached via a 3D-printed holder, which seemed the best available solution. He copes with that without a problem, so if this isn't too much bigger then I'm sure it would also be fine, and I'd definitely upgrade him to this hardware.
2) I know that this HN, and people love to be experts and poke at any available hole, but let's assume good intent and not go overboard on the 'dangerous collar' thing. I totally agree that the picture on the website is wrong, but it looks like a render, and as such has probably been farmed out to someone who doesn't know better. Stick this on a decent-quality breakaway collar and you should be fine. (Anecdata: of our two housecats, one will remove any breakaway collar within minutes; the other one doesn't care and his collar only comes off every few months if it gets caught during a cat-on-cat play-fight.)
3) Also agree that there's huge potential in this market for tracking many other things - proven by the success of the Airtag.
I have a Jiobit. It starts in ble mode and switches to gps when the cat exits a 30 m radius. It gets about 8 hours of fulll gps gsm battery life once it starts updating every 60 seconds. Normally it is 2 weeks battery life.
Note I take my cat out supervised in a large fenced in yard. He got away from me thrice over seven years. This is just a temporary safety feature now. He’s never ventured more than 100m during his getaways.
That's why Apple makes it so damn hard (compared to any Android I've ever owned) to turn off Location, Bluetooth (and maybe WiFi) on their mobile devices.
Since iOS 11, turning Bluetooth off from the control center only puts Bluetooth on a timeout until the next morning instead of disabling it permanently, as one would expect. Even when it’s off, the antenna stays on, looking for new devices. You can turn it all the way off by digging into the settings menu, but as soon as you turn it on for any reason, the cycle starts again.
I personally really like this, because 95% of the time when I turn off my Bluetooth what I’m really wanting to do is put it on pause. The times when I want to turn it off completely, I also want to turn off everything else (Wi-Fi etc.) so airplane mode (which does not time out) works great.
Similar to what rodorgas said about bluetooth, when you disable WiFi it’s normally “stop connecting to (currently) nearby wifi until tomorrow”. The radio doesn’t turn off and it still actively scans for other wifi to connect to (will connect 5min later at your friend’s house, for example).
I definitely think it’s inexcusable that the control center buttons are so misleading, but at least “Hey Siri, turn off Bluetooth” (or Wi-Fi) really does it.
It is a lot of work to acquire and track the signals and this is often implemented in software. And then afterwards it takes a lot of work to calculate the navigational solution from these raw measurements.
This basically keeps a microprocessor busy which uses energy.
One trick people do for ultra-low energy non-realtime GPS tracking of wildlife is to store the “raw” radio samples and do as little processing on the tracking device as possible.[1] Then once the tracker gets back they batch process all the samples recorded and reconstruct where the animal has been. That is obviously a tradeoff of more storage used for less energy consumption. Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
What do you mean by "hardware decoding"? There are custom chips which do the whole GNSS business. So they are doing "hardware decoding", the chip is the hardware.
I'm not aware of how all of them are implemented internally, but my understanding is that the acquisition&tracking of signals usually happens in the digital domain. Can be wrong on that of course.
All of them I am aware of do hardware decoding of the signal and do the linear algebra to find their location in software. Speaking mostly based on the cheap ublox chips and partially open source navspark chips I've dealt with.
The problem is the signal processing part of GPS is quite computationally difficult. I think it was around 10ish years ago it even became possible to do the full real-time decoding on a laptop. At startup, you need to find the GPS signals. This means searching for all 32 possible satellite code patterns across the range of possible Doppler shifts. During testing, this was what took most of the startup (cold start) time. You need roughly 4-6 of them to get a position, so this has to be done in parallel. Once you've found the satellite it takes another 30 seconds to get the satellite position. GPS signals are very slow at 50 bits/sec.
By comparison, actually solving for location is a simple linear algebra problem with 4 unknowns (lat, long, alt, time; but in a more convenient coordinate system). You only do this a few times per second. The hardware does the higher rate signal phase estimation. For example the navspark is a single core SPARC microcontroller running at 100MHz with 200 kB of RAM. That's enough to do 50 solutions per second, though they reduced that to 10 Hz to make space for a user program too.
A ton of work goes into caching strategies to narrow down that initial search space. Modern chips will let you load in exactly which satellites to expect overhead (e.g. based on position and orbit info from cell network). There is a whole other caching strategy based on a approximate "almanac" in the GPS signal for offline devices. With all of that known before the receiver turns on, you can get a solution in a couple seconds.
> Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
why can't you just forward those radio samples back, and process that on the receiver end (your phone), vs processing on device and sending back the location?
It should be a tradeoff of less battery consumption on device, and no need for large storage, at the expense of a lot more bandwidth? Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
> It should be a tradeoff of less battery consumption on device, and no need for large storage, at the expense of a lot more bandwidth?
Yes. I believe so.
> Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
Good question. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe someone can chime in?
What would be interesting if you could send a "ping" signal to the tracker and it only start sending samples back then. After all most of the time you don't need to know where the cat is, only when it is "overdue" and the owner starts worrying.
One of the things I found initially surprising (but less so when I thought about it), was that when I switched from wired headphones to bluetooth, I got longer battery life from my phone. Apparently, there’s less energy involved in sending a radio signal than in driving a speaker.
The "chip rate" of GPS L1 C/A (the main one) is 1023 kchips/sec. So you end up with a signal that is over 1 MHz wide to encode 50 bits/sec. Nyquist-Shannon theorem says* you thus need over 1 Msamp/sec (using complex numbers), probably more like 2 Msps because of Doppler, to capture that. GPS is pretty forgiving and 4 bits/sample is plenty (2 bits is usable), but that would still be 1 MB/s of high entropy data. Note the system linked in the parent comment only records in 12 ms bursts. That captures enough info to find position offline, but only if you add in the historical orbit information that normally takes 30 sec to download off of the GPS signal. Streaming 1 MBps of data is doable, but I think would draw much more power than solving on device. Just recording to an SD card is far less.
* The Nyquist-Shannon theorem actually says the converse, but for anything you'll encounter outside the recesses of a math department, it's still the optimal solution.
I'd guess that it would take more energy to send all of the samples to a central server over an IoT network (which are optimized for infrequent, very small messages) than to calculate a position fix locally.
Maybe it might be worth it for a complete "from scratch" GPS fix (where the receiver needs to figure out where it approximately is and needs to re-download the complete GPS almanach and ephemerides), though – I have no idea how short a server-side-decodeable sample actually is!
But since we're talking about a network-connected device anyway, I'd guess that downloading the ephemerides via the IoT connection (single-digit kilobytes) would be much more economical in that case too.
Maybe as an analogy, consider local vs. cloud QR code decoding: If you can manage to send a single, shart photo of the code, the cloud might be better, but since you can't actually be sure when the camera is pointed at the code and not moving, you might need to take a minute-long video, and look for the one non-blurry frame on the cloud.
Edit: Just saw the other comment – apparently we're talking about a short video moreso than a small JPEG :)
"Ordinary" antennas are completely passive, just a bit of metal. It's the maths for data recovery and trilateration (not triangulation!) that is processor heavy.
You can buy chips which only do the RF tasks. But you can also buy chips which do “everything”, the RF, the maths, some even do sensor fusion with data from accelerometers and wheel odometry sensors. All in one chip.
You can read here[1] more about what the RF frontend does. This is the crux of it: “Its two-stage receiver amplifies the incident 1575.42MHz GPS signal, downconverts it to a first IF of 37.38MHz, further amplifies it, and then downconverts to a second IF of 3.78MHz. An internal 2- or 3-bit ADC (selectable as a 1-bit sign with a 1- or 2-bit magnitude) samples the second IF and outputs a digitized signal to the baseband processor.”
Thanks for this! It's interesting that the article says doing it in software can be more power efficient than having a dedicated chip for the intermediate frequencies. Does that mean there exists "dumber" RF chips that do less, offloading the math to the main CPU for power savings? It seems like the kinda thing that would be commonplace if so...?
I guess my fundamental confusion is why "listening" to a broadcast signal takes so much power, vs say a FM receiver or passive wifi snooping.
Weak signal, small antenna, high gain, lots of current to run amplifiers. And you need to keep receiving signal to get the position, not just enable it for a second then disable
GPS receivers are passive only in the sense that they don't transmit. But pulling a meaningful signal from a 25W transmitter 20,000 km away requires some seriously power-hungry signal processing. It's an engineering miracle that it works at all.
It is not impossible if the GPS is off by default. Battery life is 20 hours only in "lost mode", aka when the location is being updated every 30 seconds. If you don't need that, and are okay with updates on demand, it can last a year.
I posted the table that literally said exactly OPs comment. It clear you commented without reading, which violates the good-faith covenant of this website.
I posted the table that literally said exactly OPs comment. I have little patience for people that can’t be bothered to read yet still voice their opinions. They do not belong here.
20 hours for Lost Mode seems much too low. Ideally if away from home for a certain period (or if no motion is detected - I'm not sure if the device has the technology) it should go into sending out position every hour rather than 30s so it can last indefinitely - days/weeks atleast (like some vehicle trackers do)
I was a product manager for a personnel tracking solution that relied on a bluetooth-like technology.
I don't remember how it started exactly, but given the number of cat owners on the team, I started joking that I wanted to repurpose our tech and start a cat tracking app called "locatify."
Not only has the name locatify since been taken, I keep seeing references to cat tracking solutions everywhere!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 439 ms ] threadIt happens to cats all the time when you live near farms, you either get used to it or learn to keep your cat indoor.
(If you only ever 'adopt' stray cats, it's a reasonable coping strategy to consider their presence somewhat ephemeral)
Never ever will I put anything artificial on a cat again, far too dangerous.
Still I hope to see new and improved iteration of it!
Back in 2012 I was using a Zoombak for my cats, which was designed for dogs. Eventually one of them started getting less and less fur under his collar because the Zoombak was wiggling back and forth as he was running, causing the collar to chafe.
He didn’t seem to mind it though, and eventually he’d recognize my car as I drove to pick him up. He’d jump into the back seat like a dog right when the door opened. I miss that fella.
For a traditional cat collar, you might have an engraved nametag the size of a quarter. Even an apple airtag is clunky in comparison - and this thing looks several times the size of an airtag.
It's impressively small for something with LTE, and a multi-month battery life, it's just a lot bigger than a quarter.
I currently rely on an AirTag, and for the most part it’s great as long as someone’s iPhone is nearby. However, I’m missing that GPS component.
I’d pay for this as I currently don’t have the time to build it nor the experience in building PCBs. Could be a fun project at some point, though.
Turned out to be a scam with legal address in farm in UK. Collar came but it was extremely poor quality, didn't match pics on the website, app was crap, GPS was not really working (it felt that it is tracking my phone's GPS that usually is off).
Can't get to trying another product.
You cannot expect a 4G + GPS to have a long battery life.
With the collar that comes with it, he loses it every couple of weeks usually nearby bushes but we always find it and everything is good to go from there.
But it comes with a subscription.
[1] https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/rf-range-antennas-rfm69-librar...
This cat tracker might just free my wallet from its paracord prison.
It prevents from losing the wallet in the first place, once it is lost it's a much bigger problem...
Important to note that this fellow has already published detailed engineering notes, BOMs, all of the gerbers. I believe this really matters when taking this to KickStarter, which is exactly what he should do.
One thing to consider is that many animals will not wear collars. However, they might wear a well-designed harness.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/-/news-collar-warning-after-cat-die...
Of course you could add a quick release/stretchy part to the collar so it is safe, but that also means that the tracker would easily get lost (especially if the cat isnt used to collars since kittenhood, they tend to be too annoyed by them and try to remove them)
Also, whats the point of a tracker if its not on the cat?
If it do falls off (by mistake or because the quick release did its intended job), at least you now have a good starting point where to go search for the cat. Assuming it doesn't fall off the very first day, you might also have a good idea or sense of in which area the cats normally goes strolling due to the tracking feature.
Well, if your cat is one that tolerates a collar most of the time, he'll have the tracker on most of the time, which is better than no tracking at all. One of our cats tolerates a collar without any problem.
The dog GPS collars made by e.g. Whistle are waterproof, IPX8.
You might not get a cell signal under a couple of feet of water, but that much water also means you probably aren't finding the gadget even if you have a recent GPS fix.
For those worried about collars, I can confirm that https://www.coolcatcollars.co.uk collars do come off. You can also use a luggage scale to measure the force it takes to release.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37511036
And the old saying "knows just enough to be dangerous".
The fact they got this far without knowing this safety information is concerning, to say the least.
For an indoor outdoor-occasionally GPS-tracked cat, collars are fine. There is no case where they will get themselves into trouble and be unaccompanied to ruin.
https://ek.explodingkittens.com/kittyconvict
Plus, this doesn't have the same potential for abuse as it has more limited battery life than NFC beacons.
I adjusted my wifi to cover a bit more of my garden area and since then battery life has increased to 2-3 days.
The main missing thing from this is waterproof design. Doesn't need to survive immersion (unless you have a Turkish Van) but it will get damp as the cat pushes through wet undergrowth or if the cat gets caught by a sudden shower.
Main things would be an ip67 rated usb connector, and a channel for rubber seal along the case join.
(edited to add)
From the STL, this is much bigger than a tabcat. The tabcat is 23x33x12mm in its silicone cover. This is ~27x60x13mm.
Another handy feaure of the tabcat (although not essential) is a beeper.
```
$ whereis cat
cat: /bin/cat /usr/share/man/man1/cat.1
```
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name#Arab_family_naming...
which cat | cat
Keep them indoors.
No, but there is traffic and plenty of people who take objection to cats fouling their gardens and will happily leave out a saucer of antifreeze.
If you live in an urban area, the kindest thing to do is keep you cat indoors.
Source: I’ve had both indoor and outdoor cats, including cats that transitioned to outdoor after being raised indoor. Lost one outdoor cat tragically in middle of his lifespan. But his equally-outdoor brother lived to 19, and all the outdoor cats hands down seemed happier on average (less lethargic, less neurotic, less obsessive, less overeating).
One source suggests anywhere from 2x to 10x increase in life expectancy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_wildcat
Your very post (and Wikipedia link) undermines the argument you are tying to make.
You are letting your very obvious personal bias determine your interpretation of what is an objective fact.
[1] https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/native-fauna#:~:text=N....
So the discussion to have here is 'do we accept having domesticated animals in environments they didn't originate from'.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/domestica...
... so they are domesticated and not native... ???
By definition, domestic animals and plants have no native home except with humans. This is why we call domestic cats who escape and live in the wild "feral," not "wild," because a feral animal is specifically a domestic animal not living with humans, not a non-domestic native animal. It does not matter whether they 'domesticated themselves' or not, they are a domestic species and therefore not equatable with a wild one.
As a result, your point simply makes no sense. Domestic cats have no 'native lands' because they are not and cannot be 'native' anywhere except in human settlements.
https://www.science.org/content/article/genes-turned-wildcat...
http://www.jabg.org/view/JABG_202303_02.pdf
from the looks of it, you found an inkling of confirmation and rolled with it. you think you got a science backing for your ideas, but nah, wrong. remind yourself when you read all the articles claiming "near identical DNA!" that human DNA is ~1.6% different from gorilla DNA. geneticists are seeing larger differences between domestic and wild cat species.
> Can you point out the part of the article that disagrees with the assertion "cats are domestic animals"?
This is neither relevant nor the issue being discussed. It is a straw man, and you all too well know this. No one has at any point claimed that there are not domestic cats.
The entire point made was that cats are a native species in many parts of Europe, and that research shows not only that cats domesticated themselves, but that domestic and wild cats are genetically almost identical. The fact that domestic cats exist does not prevent native wild cats from also existing.
That said, this product looks like it can help people who lose their indoor cats, which happens. I recently helped rescue a neighbors cat who snuck out and stayed outside for 2 full months.
Over time you can get rid of the leash and just walk side by side.
My cat was 10 when we moved to a ground floor apartment, so we couldn't realistically prevent him from escaping, so we started walking him. He lived over 16 years, the last two of which he would only go outside to lay in the bushes.
Deer, possums, raccoons, and other wildlife who live outdoors seem incapable of learning how to avoid it, so it's unclear my cat will either.
Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
Or, you only notice the ones which have been killed. Otherwise, deer, possum and raccoon populations should decrease pretty fast. And of feral cats of course.
> Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
I'm sorry to hear that, but I am curious why it was only the male cats. Perhaps they are less skittish? What happened to the female cats?
> So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
Alright, but I would hope you can at least agree that keeping cats indoors all the time is not preparing them for the outdoors, in the cases when they do slip out.
All animals should be free, if you can't provide freedom to your animals then you should not have any.
What about the fact that animals introduced to an environment by humans in the name of "freedom" cause disproportionate harm to other animals? Whose freedom wins?
I'm sure it seems easy to you to not have animal companions, but plenty of rational people place a lot more value on it than you do.
Your point of view is based on faulty assumptions about the importance of that experience.
It's the same as cigarets, you know it's toxic to you and others but still you want it regardless.
PS: I love cats and always had one until few years back but I don't want to have one to force him to stay indoor, as long as I don't have a place for it to go out I won't get any.
Again, keep your cat indoors. Otherwise, you're part of the problem.
By and large, domestic US outdoor cats are not in fragile ecosystems, but they are the number one killer of birds. They roam outside along with other species (like squirrels and crows) that have had to adapt to the insane environment humans have developed.
I've always seen my pets as persons, with feeling and moods. Trapping them inside is cruel. Cats in nature are adapted to roam and explore.
My cat in the US regretably, has brought home a few birds, but all of the birds were species of least concern. Fortunately, there are a lot of cheap collars owners can use to help alert the bird of the cat's presence before predation occurs.
I recently took a course on ornithology and was stunned by how difficult a bird's life is from the migrations, predations, building collisions, and the sheer amount of work they invest in nesting and raising their young. It's easy to take them for granted until you actually understand what they go through just to exist, unlike a pampered cat who gets to kill for sport.
Cat owners who allow their cats outdoors are being cruel to birds and small animals, period. A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference. There's no way to wiggle out of this moral dilemma. If you love nature and want it balanced and protected, then keep your cat indoors. Or, if you can, train your cat to kill only invasive species.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2020/09/the-232... https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
Of course they don't know which is of least concern, but by and large I do see everything they kill because they bring it home and I have to clean it up. It is in their nature to bring it home.
> A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference.
Bells and other deterrents absolutely do make a difference (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.85044...)
There's barely any species of concern in urban environments anymore, because:
* Industrial run-off * Habitat destruction * Roads and highways with vehicles * Air pollution * Light pollution * Poisons * Electrocution from power lines * Buildings with glass (actual a #2 killer of birds!) * Hunting (both legal and illegal)
Domestic cats are merely a cherry on top of the myriad of environmental mistakes humans have made in the name of progress.
They are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
If you truly care about birds I would urge you to:
* stop driving * use no lights past dusk * not use or consume any product that contributes to air pollution * not use any power grid that uses power lines * not use any building with glass * not consume any poultry
So while you pet and play with Fluffy that evening, the mother bird she maimed earlier that day can no longer make ~100 trips a day to feed its hatchings. She tries, but can only manage a dozen or so trips. They slowly starve over the next few days despite the mother's desperate attempts.
That bird survived all the other leading causes of bird mortality, but not Fluffy. And Fluffy gets a few more bonus kills when the hatchlings expire.
I'm curious what would you do if people had a new breed of small domesticated dog that is efficient at killing outdoor cats, and those people let that dog roam like a cat?
Given that your cat is out there doing his thing, this new breed of outdoor dog is also out there doing his thing. As you said, they are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
His owners think he's a person. It would be cruel to lock him up all day.
But one of these dogs swiftly kills your outdoor cat. And your next cat. In fact, they're becoming the leading cause of death among outdoor cats, seconded only by cars.
Would you a) demand that dog breed not be allowed to roam because it harms cats, b) keep your next cat indoors, or c) ?
2. if your cat wants to go outdoors, you can leash them like any dog-owner is required to do. the whole "cats need to be in nature" argument is rooted in the assumption that you as the owner aren't involved in that nourishment. if you can't be a responsible cat owner (keeping it from roaming on it's own; keeping it stimulated) then don't get a pet. is the cat really a critical unit of your family if you skirt responsibility and are okay w/ it dying violently outside?
3. the US is very much a fragile ecosystem. source on it not being? we, like many other place, have had a huge and trending decline in biodiversity.
4. cats haven't adapted to the human environment; we've developed technology and laws that have protected cats in our human environment. i'm not sure how they've had to adapt as they can interact with humans safely.
5. you don't see everything your cat kills. you may be able to placate yourself that your cat isn't one of the "rampant killers", but that thought isn't based solely on fact.
Would you want to live in a cage your whole life? Then why do you want to do it to others? Never heard of the Golden Rule: "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you"?
I understand your point of view, I share it, cats are deadly to many smaller species that's why if you're against that then you shouldn't get a cat at all.
PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
And if you are living in a shoebox yourself, where you regard your own home as a "prison" or a "cage", then you have no business keeping such a pet anyway.
> PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason.
> Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason. I didn't know about the domestic one.
Many people who have cats do so by adoption of strays found in their area so not getting a cat is the same as letting a cat roam free in that area without a safe space and consistent food source.
The whole "prisoner" argument seems so dumb to me when we've already decided as a society that it's in the best interests of society to neuter/spay as many cats and dogs as possible to prevent an explosion in the stray population. Do you think we shouldn't do that because you wouldn't neuter/spay yourself?
We can have both desexing pets and letting them roam free. No need to force them to live inside.
How free are they if you consider them yours?
In a lot of ways cat's are still in the early phases of domestication and the concept of keeping them indoors only is rather new.
But vehicles don't need the indoor tracking, or the home base station, and when moving have nigh-unlimited battery power available.
So I imagine it depends on how much those features are adding to the price. Also, it looks like the device isn't commercially available, and with BGAs etc it's not easy to DIY either.
The cost of the device is less than $100, excluding the cellular data cost.
If yours isn't I´d suggest setting up slocate.
Ideal device (for a bike) would:
Fit inside the handlebar
Have eSIM support and 5g
Open sw/hw
Bring-your-own data eSIM
This comes pretty close already.
As a multiple cat owner with decades of experience and someone who has rescued many cats off the street in NY(T&R because yes its not good to have hundreds of strays per block), you downvoters have zero context here and your comments have been nothing but opinions.
Heres a super simple usecase that can shut you all up. People have indoor cats escape! This is traumatizing to owners, like a family member being abducted. It can go on for months and yes, people find their pets (we did), at great cost and burden.
And before you go claiming irresponsibility, this happen to us when someone broken into our unit. So fuck off please.
There is research on how indoor cars live happier healthier lives that are yes 10x longer, because outdoor cats literally die at 1 and 2 years old (they are adults) and indoor cats live to be 20+
I think the design is too big and the battery life too uncompelling but open source means better luck at being improved. Amazon sells a lot of bunk as I’ve tried a few and only had luck with jiobit. I’d like to tinker with this.
And PS, I like to rant at hacker news, the community is so boring otherwise.
I just wish it were smaller.
I’ve heard a collar might help with that.
A lot of people with indoor cats also leash train them.
The fourth cat doesn't have one because she can't eat kibble without it causing urinary problems.
Where do you live? We had outdoor cats live until they were 19 and 17, both passed from age-related illness. Relatively calm neighborhood away from any heavy traffic, granted; but still.
For one, the average area of a house in the USA seems to be above 2000 square feet, whereas here in the UK it's more like 750 or so.
It feels worse for the animal to be cramped in a tiny space all their life, so we let them outside. Also there are no predators apart from the occasional domesticated dog, so it's safer. The biggest risk is traffic, which is dependent on where you live.
The bird thing brought up every time is weird to me, because no one seems to care about birds until cats are part of the conversation, suddenly birds are the most important part of the ecosystem.
Of the current cat with free-ish outdoor access: Last year birds accounted for 3.6 percent of all recorded catches (5/138). This year birds are 1.7 percent of all recorded catches (1/58). And all of the birds I've seen caught first knocked themselves out striking windows, or flew inside the house via open door and injured themselves trying to escape in panic. The healthy ones don't let cats near them at all.
Of the prior cat, zero birds over 9 years. Of the cat before that, maybe 1 or 2 birds over 18 years.
Of course anecdotes aren't data etc, but, the impact of data is its story, and anecdotes direct and constrain the collection and analysis of data.
We've had no cats that lived between 3 and 16 years.
I have no idea why. To some degree you could get a sense which category a cat was in within the first year or so.
If I were to guess I think a cat will probably have a shorter life span in a city. More cars and more opportunities to get infected with diseases from other cats.
Those cats (or people) who make it through that crisis will gain some hard humility forever more and seem to go on for a long time after. Those who don't, well, obviously that's it. I had two big male cats back in the 90s, who being tough young males naturally once they got to 2-3 years old felt pretty confident. First of them sadly vanished and never saw him again. The second a few years later got into some fight or flight with/from something, I don't know what, but there were shrieks. But he escaped/fought and I found him. Forever after he was very careful, he'd go out the door onto the porch and whereas before he'd just instantly head off, after he'd immediately sit down and observe/listen for a good long while first. He lived to 21 years old. Another outdoor/indoor lived to 19.
It is truly hard to take the risk, but they're so much happier for it. We all reach the same end in the end, so I feel very strongly that there are limits to how far one should take "being safe". And there are good ways to massively reduce the bird issue. I love birds as well, but 3-5 caught per year when I'm feeding and support orders of magnitude more birds than that seems acceptable.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Downvoted and flagged.
All my cats (all neutered) never tried to escape from our old city apartment, aside the obvious exploring the hall beyond the house door, and now that we live in a small town in a cottage with garden and trees my two cats both enjoy wandering around the property, but they eventually come home for the night. It wasn't that easy: they had to fight for territory since this property has been kept empty for years so that it was easily taken by the neighborhood cats, but so far it looks like our cats won.
Hard disagree here. All four of my cats are spayed or neutered and the one is determined to go out and explore. She will sneak behind your back and fly through the door as it closes. She looks peaceful and sleeping across the room, but don't let that fool you -- she springs to life and flies out the door when you least expect it.
She once escaped through a basement window, about 6 feet above the floor with no objects below it, through a gap which was just a few inches wide. I got her back about three days later by setting up a motion activated camera and a bowl of food outside.
I've fostered over 50 cats now so I feel like I know and understand their behavior pretty well by this point.
We don't disagree here, I never wrote that neutered/spayed cats don't want to explore, that's normal behavior for every feline out there, but that those who aren't can suffer a lot from being forced home. For cats which aren't spayed or neutered it isn't just about exploring anymore but satisfying their urge to mate, and they won't return until that need is satisfied, if they do.
1) One of our (indoor, house) cats is always keen to escape, and as such currently wears a breakaway collar with an Airtag attached via a 3D-printed holder, which seemed the best available solution. He copes with that without a problem, so if this isn't too much bigger then I'm sure it would also be fine, and I'd definitely upgrade him to this hardware.
2) I know that this HN, and people love to be experts and poke at any available hole, but let's assume good intent and not go overboard on the 'dangerous collar' thing. I totally agree that the picture on the website is wrong, but it looks like a render, and as such has probably been farmed out to someone who doesn't know better. Stick this on a decent-quality breakaway collar and you should be fine. (Anecdata: of our two housecats, one will remove any breakaway collar within minutes; the other one doesn't care and his collar only comes off every few months if it gets caught during a cat-on-cat play-fight.)
3) Also agree that there's huge potential in this market for tracking many other things - proven by the success of the Airtag.
It is 20 hours in gps mode:
https://www.findmycat.io/docs/TrackerModes#summary
I have a Jiobit. It starts in ble mode and switches to gps when the cat exits a 30 m radius. It gets about 8 hours of fulll gps gsm battery life once it starts updating every 60 seconds. Normally it is 2 weeks battery life.
Note I take my cat out supervised in a large fenced in yard. He got away from me thrice over seven years. This is just a temporary safety feature now. He’s never ventured more than 100m during his getaways.
Apple air tags last for 12 months apparently
https://www.tile.com/en-au/blog/airtag-battery-life#
This basically keeps a microprocessor busy which uses energy.
One trick people do for ultra-low energy non-realtime GPS tracking of wildlife is to store the “raw” radio samples and do as little processing on the tracking device as possible.[1] Then once the tracker gets back they batch process all the samples recorded and reconstruct where the animal has been. That is obviously a tradeoff of more storage used for less energy consumption. Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06310
I'm not aware of how all of them are implemented internally, but my understanding is that the acquisition&tracking of signals usually happens in the digital domain. Can be wrong on that of course.
The problem is the signal processing part of GPS is quite computationally difficult. I think it was around 10ish years ago it even became possible to do the full real-time decoding on a laptop. At startup, you need to find the GPS signals. This means searching for all 32 possible satellite code patterns across the range of possible Doppler shifts. During testing, this was what took most of the startup (cold start) time. You need roughly 4-6 of them to get a position, so this has to be done in parallel. Once you've found the satellite it takes another 30 seconds to get the satellite position. GPS signals are very slow at 50 bits/sec.
By comparison, actually solving for location is a simple linear algebra problem with 4 unknowns (lat, long, alt, time; but in a more convenient coordinate system). You only do this a few times per second. The hardware does the higher rate signal phase estimation. For example the navspark is a single core SPARC microcontroller running at 100MHz with 200 kB of RAM. That's enough to do 50 solutions per second, though they reduced that to 10 Hz to make space for a user program too.
A ton of work goes into caching strategies to narrow down that initial search space. Modern chips will let you load in exactly which satellites to expect overhead (e.g. based on position and orbit info from cell network). There is a whole other caching strategy based on a approximate "almanac" in the GPS signal for offline devices. With all of that known before the receiver turns on, you can get a solution in a couple seconds.
why can't you just forward those radio samples back, and process that on the receiver end (your phone), vs processing on device and sending back the location?
It should be a tradeoff of less battery consumption on device, and no need for large storage, at the expense of a lot more bandwidth? Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
Yes. I believe so.
> Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
Good question. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe someone can chime in?
What would be interesting if you could send a "ping" signal to the tracker and it only start sending samples back then. After all most of the time you don't need to know where the cat is, only when it is "overdue" and the owner starts worrying.
* The Nyquist-Shannon theorem actually says the converse, but for anything you'll encounter outside the recesses of a math department, it's still the optimal solution.
Maybe it might be worth it for a complete "from scratch" GPS fix (where the receiver needs to figure out where it approximately is and needs to re-download the complete GPS almanach and ephemerides), though – I have no idea how short a server-side-decodeable sample actually is!
But since we're talking about a network-connected device anyway, I'd guess that downloading the ephemerides via the IoT connection (single-digit kilobytes) would be much more economical in that case too.
Maybe as an analogy, consider local vs. cloud QR code decoding: If you can manage to send a single, shart photo of the code, the cloud might be better, but since you can't actually be sure when the camera is pointed at the code and not moving, you might need to take a minute-long video, and look for the one non-blurry frame on the cloud.
Edit: Just saw the other comment – apparently we're talking about a short video moreso than a small JPEG :)
And here's an interesting research paper on the topic: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Sending to your phone via radio? If the phone is in range you don't need GPS. You can use UWB or an audible beeper to find the cat.
"Ordinary" antennas are completely passive, just a bit of metal. It's the maths for data recovery and trilateration (not triangulation!) that is processor heavy.
You can read here[1] more about what the RF frontend does. This is the crux of it: “Its two-stage receiver amplifies the incident 1575.42MHz GPS signal, downconverts it to a first IF of 37.38MHz, further amplifies it, and then downconverts to a second IF of 3.78MHz. An internal 2- or 3-bit ADC (selectable as a 1-bit sign with a 1- or 2-bit magnitude) samples the second IF and outputs a digitized signal to the baseband processor.”
1: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/rf-frontend-ic-...
I guess my fundamental confusion is why "listening" to a broadcast signal takes so much power, vs say a FM receiver or passive wifi snooping.
Weak signal, small antenna, high gain, lots of current to run amplifiers. And you need to keep receiving signal to get the position, not just enable it for a second then disable
I don't remember how it started exactly, but given the number of cat owners on the team, I started joking that I wanted to repurpose our tech and start a cat tracking app called "locatify."
Not only has the name locatify since been taken, I keep seeing references to cat tracking solutions everywhere!
I wanted to call it Pussy Control but my wife wouldn't let me.