Auto Feeding the Cat with Video Confirmation

From a schedule program I wrote on my laptop I wanted to turn on an electric wall outlet which would then turn on the cat’s auto feeder. The wife said she didn’t trust this to work, so she needed a video showing the cat being feed. 

So I combined all the Z-Wave tools I posted about here with some other C# libraries to capture sound and video.  I then wrote the code to have the video automatically uploaded to my server and then send my wife an email with a link to it.

You can see a sample video here. So here are the steps that it now follows:

1. The scheduler is scheduled to feed the cat 3 times during the day.

2. When it is time, the program turns on the laptop’s video and microphone.

3. The program sends a Z-Wave signal to the wall outlet to turn it on.

4. The program waits 30 seconds, then combines the video and sound.

5. The program uploads the new video to my web server.

6. It then sends out an email with a link to a page that will play the video.

I”m going to look into seeing if I can count the number of times it hears the sound of the food dinging the bowl as it falls. Then I could have the count in the subject of the email so it would be clear there was a problem if the count was low.

Also, I’m going to use my ChangeAlerts! program to send me a text message if a cat video isn’t uploaded within 5 minutes of its scheduled time. That is a hungry cat that cannot miss a meal!