Have a cat that won’t stay off your counters? I do. I finally got fed up with it enough to do something about it: scare the crap out of him with a motion-detecting blender (while recording the results for my own amusement, of course).
Confused at what you’re looking at? This is a repeating shot of security camera footage of my cat jumping on the counter – in search of a plant to munch on – and initiating my Blender Defender. Take a look at the following comic to get a better understanding 🙂
Videos
Sorry, but you’re going to have to pretend you can hear an extremely loud blender while you watch these clips
Details
If you were to walk in my house, you may see something you dont normally see in a kitchen. On the wall, to the left of my sink is a webcam (network camera). It is plugged into the network jack and screwed into the wall plate cover, supporting itself. It doesnt get it the way, nor do we ever have to think about it. The camera is being monitored for motion by my computer upstairs in our office.
The camera itself is one of the cheapest network cameras out there, the DCS-900. It can be picked up for about $120 or so. There are a couple network cameras that are a little cheaper, but the D-Link one is pretty rugged and makes it easy to get into the raw feeds, something that cant be said for many other cameras.
As you can see from the videos above, the blender and the strobe light are both controlled by an X10 unit. The unit is sent an on or off command from the computer running upstairs by means of an X10 Firecracker. The Firecracker is just a wireless X10 transmitter that plugs into your serial port. I wont get into explaining it much here, but one thing to note is that is happily co-exists with my CM11A unit.
The computer upstairs is running the ‘motion‘ library for linux. As soon as it detects something moving on camera, it starts recording frames. While it is saving frames, it also initiates another Perl script I wrote that sends an X10 command to turn on the blender and strobe, wait 3 seconds, then turn them off. After the script is done detecting motion, it then splices all the JPG frames together using ffmpeg and saves the resulting movie as a SWF file, which you can see above. Finally, after it saves the movie, I have it set up to email me a link to the movie so I can see the results from where ever I’m at (remotely by using my phone).
Is this cruel?
Of course not! To teach a cat not to do something, it has to get the idea that what it is doing is a bad thing. One way to do so is to sternly tell your cat ‘NO’ when it does something. The cat may learn that it is bad, but more often than not, the cat learns that it’s not supposed to it when your around. This is not what you want. The best way to teach the cat not to get on a counter is to take yourself out of the picture. If the cat jumps up on the counter and is greeted with a scare, it will learn that the counter is not a very nice place to be. The cat is never harmed, but it’s instincts tell is that this may be something to be feared. Just like a vaccuum. The cat doesn’t like it at all, so it stays away.
Some will say that the cat is trying to eat the plant because he needs it for his digestion. In this case, it’s just not true. Our cat doesn’t simply eat our plants. He sees them as a toy. He plays with the stalks, digs them out, etc. We find leaves in the other rooms half the time. And, yes, he does get grass every once in a while.
Project Cost
The table below shows how much money would normally go into a project like this. This isn’t to say that I’ve spent this much, as I already had everything lying around the place, but if somebody else were to start this project, this may be what they should expect to pay.
| Item | Notes | Price |
| Strobe Light | Bought from Spencer’s | 20.00 |
| Blender | Housewarming present, woot. | 50.00 |
| X10 Firecracker | Check Ebay and Amazon if you’re looking for one | 12.00 |
| X10 Appliance Module | You wouldnt want a Lamp Module for this. | 12.00 |
| Network Camera | D-Link DSC-900 | 120.00 |
| $214.00 |
No one was replaced by anybody. ,
One wonders what you already had the surveillance cameras and motion detectors for. 😮
I have re-typed this 5 times because my cat keeps lying on my numpad.
People it is not cruel. Whoever said that cats will learn to not do it when you are around is true, this is the only way to teach them, and funny too. I wish I could find a way to keep my one cat from playfully chasing the other one around. I just squirt her with water. 😈 😆
People it is not cruel. Whoever said that cats will learn to not do it when you are around is true, this is the only way to teach them, and funny too. I wish I could find a way to keep my one cat from playfully chasing the other one around. I just squirt her with water. 😈 😆
So what if your kitty climbs up on the sink…kitties love their water fresh from the tap. You're unnecessarily terrorizing your poor kitty. Can't you put your dang plant on top of the fridge or sumthin'?
Your right cats do not belong on the kitchen counter. For those without an already existing bunch of elaborate equipment this same thing minus the video can be created with a motion sensor from a motion activated light (you can get one at your local hardware) hook it up to an outlet and plug in the strobe and the blender. The cat is getting nothing more than a little startel less invasive then those dog shock colars. not cruel at all.
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😈 Nice
This is one of the funniest things I have ever seen! We have a kitten who is on the counter/table CONSTANTLY! We have seriously tried everything, but he still goes up there. And the only reason he does it is to mooch for food (which he gets enough of at meal times). I just may have to try something like this… just to see what would happen… although, I have a pretty good idea, hahaha!
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Awesome. How do you stop it going off every time you walk into your kitchen? Or do you just have to remember to turn it off?
and your system really wouldn't need the expensive camera anyway…
kudos to your creative and tinkering talents
good post – 'poor kitty' people remember: you prep food on your counters, and kitty walks in litterboxes!
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this is sooo funny i could use this on my cat! 😆 😛 🙂 😀 😎 😈 :exclaim:
I think it's funny to see the cats fly off the counter. It doesn't hurt them… 😀
😀 😛
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Can this be used to train kids? Someone could make a mint.
That's Great! This gave me some insight on how to protect my trucks parked in a fenced area. I'd like to electrify the fence given motion.
this is so fucking gay you people must have no life what so ever go get laid by a chinease person
Why is scaring cats so funny? I have just had my cat euphonised at the vets. Obviously this video upset me deeply although the flashy lights were cool and you scaring the bejeezers out of your cat was so fucking funny.
Marty how can you be upset about scaring a cat after you've turned yours into a euphonium. My can had to be euthanised not long ago and I think it's in very bad taste to recycle beloved pets as brass instruments(at least a violin would be traditional)
😥 Wouldn't it be cheaper/simpler/more humane to just move the plant,or get rid of it all together? Or give the cat away to a KIND home before it develops some sort of heart condition.
I just want to let you know that I have not laughed at anything this hard in a damn long time! I have a cat that just straight messes with all my stuff. Claws my office chair, lies on my keyboard and various other computers and hardware and so on.
Also…. Even if you did go out and spend $214.00 on the equipment to do this, GREAT!!! I can think of other things I spend cash on and I don't laugh even nearly as hard as I have been for the last half an hour!
Plasma2002 keep up the awesome work! I love it!!!
Also, I got my cats to stop jumping up onto my kitchen counters by laying out a couple strips of tape, sticky side up near the edge. They tried jumping up a couple of times but they don't really do it anymore. The sound they make in the middle of the night after trying it the couple times they did was hilarious!
I haven't laughed this hard for months. The videos are hilarious.
🙂 😆 Simply to bad you couldn't entice the cat to jump in the blender (minus the cutting blades) . Bet it'd never get near a counter top after the first experience….
YES I dislike cats immensely.
it is funny, but we live with quite a few cats and I imagine the sound in the middle of the night would scare wake us and startle us. Someone should start a web site that has everyones great cat inventions. I'll submit something 😀
It is his cat, his counter, and his house. Oh, and the cat will live. Very Funny!
man this is soooo funny, especially the fat black one at the end!
Wouldn't work on my cat – he's deaf and likes bright lights.
Whoever find this funny is obviously a moron 🙄
Totally agree that whoever find this funny is obviously a moron
I think you are a moron 😀
F**K, I seem to have become a moron
WTF is wrong with you people? those stupid things really grinds my gears….
hey asshole, your cat just wants clean/fresh running water. he would stop doing that if you changed his water dish EVERY DAY or 2x a day, or bought him a water fountain. idiot
Really Marty? You had the vet make your cat sound nice?
Simply hilarious! 😆
All you bleeding hearts need grab a tighter grip on reality. The whole point of having a pet is to torture it.
will it work on ceiling cat? i can't get him to leave me alone at night when i'm having my "me time"
We used to tie our cat's tail to the lawn-mower spark-plug wire. One good pull of the rope and you wouldn't believe how high a kitteh can jump! BTW: You all are morons.
you're gonna make the cat break a few of her bones in one of those panic attacks, or hit her head and risk epilepsy, or just hate your guts (and rightly so) because, instead of putting the plant elsewhere (or finding out what she wants on that counter), you prefer to torture the cat to no end with stimuli that she has no way of understanding. Having a pet requires *you* to set up the home *for* the *pet*.
Haha, this is awesome! Keep up the good work!! Thanks for the notes on how to do it in linux too, sounds pretty easy : ).
You people that think this is cruel obviously have never been tormented by a disobedient animal. Or you don't mind being submissive to one. Either way, you're retarded and Plasma2002 is awesome.
May I be the first to say that, vajorie, you have no idea what you're talking about. The cat won't hate the OP, nor will the cat even know the OP set it up. The cat has no idea what a blender is or that it was rigged to scare it. All it knows is that it was jumping up on the counter and a loud noise went off. And then it stopped when it ran away. Wash, rinse, repeat. Classical conditioning at it's finest.
And your comment that one needs to setup their house for their pet? So, you own cats? Is your house one big sandbox then? You have vermin running around for it to chase? Sounds like you should be evicted 😉 Yes, a ridiculous comment to counter your equally ridiculous one.
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😆 💡 Wish I had one. The spray water bottle just isn't getting thru to my cats! I thought it was ingenious and hysterical and I own three cats. It's just conditioning.