Inspiration
After struggling with the decision of whether to bring my cat to college and ultimately deciding against it because of my long hours on campus and need to keep him indoors, I realized this is a common dilemma for pet owners.
Many people adopt pets, especially cats, without realizing the full extent of their needs. Cats are often viewed as low-maintenance or easier alternatives to dogs, but they still require enrichment and stimulation to live fulfilling lives. This misconception leaves many first-time owners, feeling unprepared and struggling to meet their needs when they're away from home most of the day.
We wanted to create a project that could connect pet to owner even when they're apart from one another. In a world where people are busier than ever, juggling long work hours, school and other obligations it's easy to feel disconnected from our loved ones.
While it's relatively easy to hop in a zoom call with your family and friends, pets can't. Inspired by that, we created project ZOOMies a way for owners to stay connected and up to date with their pets even from afar. Owners can connected by seeing their pets play, rest and interact through the app. Meanwhile pets benefit from the much-needed stimulation, exercise and the comfort of knowing they're not alone.
What it does
Project ZOOMies is made up of three main components: the smart cat collar, the interactive toy and a web-based interface that ties it together for the user.
At its core, we have the collar which tracks your cat's movements throughout the day. Whether your kitty is resting or playing, there is real time data uploaded to the cloud. This allows us to update the website in live time and provide logs of trends over time as well as being the base of the interactive features on the website.
The second component is the smart toy which connects to the collar and pulls information from the website. When the collar detects movement, the toy reacts to it by responding with movement and noise to hold their attention. The toy darts around in various patterns while swaying a pom pom at varied speeds. As long as the toy detects motion, it continues to play and remain engaging. If your cat loses interest, the toy knows to wind down ensuring it's not over stimulating or disruptive.
All the data gathered from the toy and collar are visualized on our website, compawnion.tech, where owners can check on the pets at any time. The site has a live activity feed as well as a daily breakdown of the cat's active time which is visualized in a chart and a summary of a play and rest break down making it easy to understand quickly.
To continue to build your bond with your cat further, we included a chatbot companion on the website that mirrors your cat's "mood" based on their activity, so if your cat hasn't moved much, it might respond sleepily whereas if your cat's been playing more than average, it may have a more hyper or energetic tone. It's a way to personalize user experiences while checking on their pets in a way that goes beyond numbers.
Owners can ping their cat with a customizable sound that they select through the website through the smart toy. Whether it's a chirp or a meow, this feature provides a sense of connection for both the owner and pet. Project ZOOMies works to help bridge the physical distance while maintaining connection in an interactive manner.
How we built it
We split the hardware into the physical components before putting everything together.
The cat collar is made up of an Esp32S3 Dev board and an accelerometer. The Esp32 board constantly takes accelerometer readings and uses a custom formula to calculate an “activity level” for the cat. We also compute an “activity status”, whether our pet is active or idle, based on if the activity level is higher or lower for a period of time. These measurements are sent via the internet to our backend and stored in our Firebase real time database.
The smart toy is made with an Esp32S3 Dev board, a 5V high torque motor, a wheel set and gearbox, a H-driver, a speaker and a DF player mini. On-board code controls all of these components to move our toy, play sounds, and read the activity status from the database. Based on the recent activity status sent from the collar, the smart toy modifies its behaviors to be more or less active or starting and stopping sounds, such as meowing or chirping.
We created a user interface and dashboard that updates live based on data from the collar. Check it out at compawnion.tech ! The dashboard constantly updates based on live data sent from the collar. We display the current activity status as well as a chart and statistics about our pets recent activity history, all in a fun theme.
We incorporated the Google Gemini API to create an interactive chatbot for the user to talk to the smart toy! Gemini is connected to be able to see the current activity status and total idle and active time of the pet. Like a good comPawnion, it can explain all of these to the user, with many cat puns.
Challenges we ran into
As this was the first hackathon for all our team members, one of the biggest challenges we faced was integrating everything together. While we had experience with coding and hardware individually, working as a team of four to combine all the moving parts was a new experience.
When we realized the scope of what we wanted to build, our past experience with hardware didn’t provide enough so we had to rapidly learn how to use new boards and components, and spent a significant amount of time with datasheets and pinout diagrams.
One of the hardest parts was to get all the systems running at the same time and making sure that the code worked on both boards and on the website. Blending the scripts in a real-time project was difficult because errors crossed over and pushing new code could disrupt previous working parts. This project challenged us in new ways but taught us more than we could have hoped for.
What's next for Project ZOOMies
Hardware: more robust rover, minimizing size/profile of our collar and rover electronics, printed housings for the chassis / collar. adding a camera component and video feed to the website. software: using activity data to inform & modify rover behavior adaptively, allowing users to control the rover via the website chat (play sounds, change rover behavior). All this will create a more professional and sleek version 2
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