Building a Better Mousetrap
An internet connected mousetrap
Have you ever setup a mousetrap under your kitchen sink or out in your garage, forgotten about it, and then discovered that it had done its job days if not weeks ago? Well, I had that problem too so I decided to make my mousetrap send me an email when it had been triggered. Above you can see a regular Tomcat mousetrap which has been connected to an Arduino microcontroller board. The upper jaw of the trap contains a magnet which closes a magnetic reed switch when the trap closes. This powers the microcontroller from the USB power supply, which connects to wifi and sends me an email telling me that the trap has been triggered.
This is not an entirely original idea as there are other electronic traps that can also send notifications. However, these cost far more than my project here. I’ve built another version of this trap that uses a $6.00 microcontroller and AA batteries.
If you’re interested in setting up your own IoT (Internet of Traps) let me know and maybe we can work something out. I’m always interested in getting feedback from real world use of projects like this.
Check out this article if you’re at all interested in the history of mousetraps.