A few weeks back I started finding unpleasant surprises on the canopy of my rear porch. Naturally I blamed the cats.

Home Assistant

Luckily my home setup already had this covered. I’m running Home Assistant and Frigate on an old ACER VERITON L4620G I repurposed as a Docker server. Frigate does the object detection with a Coral Edge TPU doing the inferencing, so the main CPU doesn’t sweat it. I added a new camera aimed at the porch and configured Frigate to watch for cats and people.

A few days later.. more mess. After pulling the footage it was clearly not a cat.. it was a civet. 😛

Civet

The neighbourhood mango tree strikes again. Poor cats, I blamed them for nothing.

Fix: floodlight wired into Home Assistant. The Frigate model wasn’t trained on civets specifically, but cats and civets are close enough in silhouette that it triggers reliably.

HA Trigger

Did I scare it?

Next level would be a water sprayer triggered the same way. Anyone know hardware that can take a relay signal for something like that?