If you have a lot of stray cats in your neighborhood, you may want a little help logging the adventures of each and every single one. Fortunately, where humans fall short, technology is not far behind. Someone has created a Raspberry Pi project that keeps an eye on your back garden and alerts you when you see a cat - or scares away any birds that it spots.

The Raspberry Pi CatBot spots cats, so you don't have to

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, this delightful project was the idea of Michael Suguitan. They noticed that they were getting a lot of stray cats in their garden, so they left out food to feed them. And, of course, they wanted to see which cats were coming to Michael's fine dining spot, so they set up a Raspberry Pi project to spy on them. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero to monitor the scene with a Pi camera and beams its findings to a Raspberry Pi 5 to analyze what it's seeing. If it identifies a cat, it sends a photo to Michael.

There was one problem, though. The food also attracted birds, which cat food doesn't make the best diet. The solution? Even more Pi wizardry. Now, if the Raspberry Pi 5 detects that a bird is in the scene, it will set off the bird-scaring device. This new addition is a lot less dramatic than it sounds; turns out that wiggling a stick by the window is enough to spook them, and it's simple enough to be automated.

If you want to make one yourself, check out Michael Suguitan's blog for all the details, plus some cute photos of the stray cats in his area. You can also take a peek at the code on the project's GitHub page. And if Michael finds themselves needing to keep their feline friend entertained, we recommend they make themselves a Raspberry Pi TV for cats.