I’m a big Home Assistant fan and power user. It’s the home automation platform of choice in our house and I’ve added many devices and automations, sometimes to the chagrin of Rachelle.

We also have five cats so it only makes sense to use some automations to help manage all the cat chores.

A four-panel collage of cats in various settings: top left shows a black cat with yellow eyes wearing a red collar sitting indoors by a window; top right shows a cream-colored cat with a pink heart-shaped tag; bottom left shows a tabby and white cat lying on a colorful rug; bottom right shows two long-haired cats sitting together outdoors.

Top row: Lily and Mac. Second row: Linus, Lennie and Polly.

The dashboard

To help me stay organized and visualize all the cat automations and functionality, I’ve created a cats dashboard. Let’s walk through the dashboard, and I’ll explain as we go.

A smart home dashboard for managing cats and their accessories. The interface displays the presence of four cats (Lily, Linus, Mac, and Polly), cat door status showing one cat outside, feeder information, and litter box status for two automated litter boxes with battery and waste levels.

Cat door

Our cats are indoor/outdoor cats and we have a SureFlap Microchip Cat Flap. This thing talks to a little Sure Petcare hub in our living room, and that hub is what connects to Home Assistant. It’s Cloud Polling, which isn’t the best but when I was shopping, I couldn’t find one with better local connectivity.

It allows us to use Home Assistant to lock the door when needed so the cats can’t go out. Home Assistant does this on a schedule. It’s open during the day but prevents the goblins from leaving after sunset.

Security camera footage from a cat door showing a laundry room or utility space with a white cat door flap in the center of a dark door, surrounded by household appliances, storage items, and a window with bright light streaming through it.

We have a little Unifi G3 Instant camera pointed at the cat door so we can see who’s coming and going and fiddling around at the door.

All of our cats have a microchip and it uses this chip ID to only allow our cats in. That means no neighborhood cats or raccoons can use the door, thank you please. We also get presence reporting so we can generally see who’s in, who’s out and when they transitioned.

Automatic feeders

We have Aqara Smart Pet Feeders that we use to dispense breakfast and snacks. They’re zigbee devices so they connect directly to Home Assistant and are fully local. No Aqara app needed for any part of it. These are pretty basic devices and I wish it could alert us on food level but alas, they simply dispense. The automatic feeders hit at 6 a.m., a time I set from a tile on the dashboard rather than hardcoding it. Cats go scattering every which way to get their spot at a feeder.

Litter boxes

We have two Litter Robot 4s we purchased used from Facebook Marketplace. They’re Cloud Push, which means the internet has to be up for these to work correctly with Home Assistant (or I presume the Whisker app). This thing allows us to unlock a couple of fun automations.

Voice announcements when a Litter Robot is full

When a litter box is full, Home Assistant announces it over the speakers: “The black litter robot is full and needs to be emptied.” Then when we’re up there, we pull the bag of dirty litter and reset it. If it needs a top off, we do that too. With two litter boxes and five cats, we can go a few days before one of them needs to be emptied! Not bad.

Send the robot vacuum after a cat has used the robot litter box

This is probably one of my favorite automations. Home Assistant can detect when a cat uses a litter box, which allows us to trigger automations to send the Roomba to spot clean the litter box area. We gate when the vacuum can run as we don’t want the thing running during the middle of the night if a cat goes to the bathroom.

A security camera view of the upstairs hall: a white litter robot beside a low shelf holding a planted aquarium, framed artwork on the wall behind it, and a Roomba is on the wood floor mid-hall. Timestamped August 5, 2026 at 9:02 a.m.

Lennie is an especially messy litter box user so this has been a great automation.

Helpers and trackers

So there are several helpers and trackers we use to keep up with everyone’s different dates and things and such.

  • Flea collar: We use Seresto flea collars and they need to be replaced about every 8 months. I set up a helper to track this so it announces it in the good morning announcement message when it’s due.
  • Age: Based on their birthday!
  • With Us: Based on their gotcha date!
  • Yearly Vaccines: I’ve not built this yet but I plan to also track when each cat received their vaccinations so I can remember when it’s time to reschedule.

Pet tracking dashboard showing details for a cat named Lily and her flea collar. Left panel displays Lily's information including age (7 years 3 months), weight (8.8 lb), and activity metrics. Right panel shows the Flea Collar status and a location history timeline with timestamps indicating Lily's movements between home and away locations on August 4-5, 2026.

Improvements

Cat door

I purchased the wrong cat door. When we first purchased it, we had Oliver and he was a bigger boy and I was skeptical he could fit through the smaller door. The problem is the larger door is all or nothing: locked or unlocked, for everybody. The smaller flap they sell can be set per cat. That would have been helpful in the past when someone was sick or wasn’t confident using the cat door yet and we were going to be away. We could restrict the kitten or the sick kitty while letting the rest come and go as usual.

Automatic feeders

I wish the Aqara feeders reported food levels instead of just dispensing. I also wish the automatic feeders were the chip variety and allowed us to restrict certain feeders to only certain cats. Linus likes to go around and finish off everyone else’s bowls.

Water fountains

We purchased an AquaPurr fountain but have never fully installed it. We had it in one of the bathrooms but disconnected it. My plan is to move it into the guest bathroom then hopefully we can stop fiddling with these little plastic filter ones. This thing doesn’t connect to anything but it would be super nice to eliminate the water fountain clean chore.

Conclusion

So that’s it! Thanks for reading this. Do you have any smart home automations that you especially like?

  • limelight79@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    I don’t have anything automated for our cats (and dog).

    For the cats, we use the flea and tick treatment that goes on the back of their necks every thirty days, so I have a timer set up to remind me to do that (along with giving the dog his heart worm and his own flea and tick treatment).

    There a timer to remind me to clean their recirculating water bowl.

    For their dry food, I have a system that tracks how many bags I’ve opened since the start date, then divides that out to get an average of how long a bag lasts. This is helpful when figuring out the length of time between autoship orders of food. Bags are sold by weight, but we give them food measured by volume, so it doesn’t easily convert. It takes a few bags for the measurement to settle down to a rough estimate of the number of days, but it did work after that. Just have to remember to hit the new bag button.

    One of our cats uses an inhaler with a counter on it, so I use a helper to track when I last administered it and what the counter was at. The great thing about that is that I can detect easily if I missed the treatment or if I did it and just failed to hit the button in HA. Another of the same cat’s treatments (he’s old) requires ordering medicine roughly once a month, so I track when I start a new one, then add a to-do when it’s time to reorder.

    We have four litter boxes for the three cats, and I change two of them each week, and scoop the other two (well, I scoop all four each evening, but two are changed once a week, while the other two get scooped at that time). I track what dates each one was changed last so I know the following week which ones are due. I tried remembering, and it didn’t go well. The helpers remind me.

    I would like a way to detect where the cats are in the house. Two of them do not wear collars. In particular I’d like to be able to determine whether our skittish cat (no collar) is hiding under the bed in our bedroom or not (I just want to know where he is when it’s feeding time). Would a presence sensor under there do that?