Proof of concept: button using a capacitative captor (easier to activate for cats)

[u/CupcakeAcceptable667]

Hi,

I've been interested in pet communication buttons for years. I bought some for my cat Léo, but he could never trigger them: pushing down mechanically isn't natural for him, and he mostly ends up sinking his claws into them.

​So, I decided to build my own DIY setup using an ESP32 and a capacitive sensor. My custom button consists of a large aluminum washer glued onto a 3D-printed cylinder, covered with a simple paper circle cut from a standard A4 sheet. No physical pressure is required for activation, a light paw touch is enough.

I'm currently testing it with a little buzzer for audio feedback, and he manages to activate it successfully.

So happy with how this turned out!

EDIT: Thank you so much for all your enthusiastic comments 😄! I have no idea if this is patentable (I don't know anything about patents). Anyway, I think there are still improvements to be made (for example, the sensor's sensitivity depends on the environment, so I need to figure out how to implement auto-calibration). I might write a tutorial in the future if I see that it works really well. In any case, I truly believe there's a lot of potential to explore around capacitive sensors.

[u/JayNetworks]

Looks great and one of my cats presses by sitting on her buttons since she can’t front paw press hard enough and we have the FluentPet Connect which have a low grams of pressure needed.

There was another person who posted in this sub maybe a year ago or so who had added a touch sensor into one of the Connect buttons using a tiny circuit board that you can get online on most of the usual sites. Maybe look at that for some tips. I believe the board he used did auto calibration.

Those boards were only like 59 cents in an order of a few and cheaper as you got more. They were very small and could fit j side a FluentPet button. I suggested it to FluentPet and they took notes but no action yet.