The Kitty Tube Project

Our neighborhood has a lot of feral cats. Well, they are mostly feral. By this I mean most of them will not suffer a touch from a human while a small segment of them will. Behind our back yard and across the alley, some neighbors have established a bit of colony. There are some shelters and the cats get fed back there. So, most of the population is visible in our back yard. However, one kept showing up in front of our house, a fixed female gray and white tabby. 

We started feeding her this year. Mrs. Fowler decided she should be named Lana. I sometimes call her Lala and well now she gets called either interchangeably. Before long a big oafish fixed tuxedo cat started to show up at feeding times as well. He became Sylvester. We have not verified Sylvester's gender, but since he's such a big cat, we just assumed male. The two get along okay and we have been feeding them both and no others happily since.

For a couple of years I've considered adding some feral cat shelters of my own. The colony out back is fine, but cats can be a disagreeable lot, so I always thought it would be good to add a little extra capacity. I looked at various howtos and tutorials. Some of the DIY cat shelters are quite nice. I even went as far as to online shop a local home center for parts. But, I became frustrated. So I shopped for ready-made shelters on Amazon. This is where I found The Kitty Tube. It seemed a sound offering. It's definitely a little pricey, but very well engineered. I bought it for Lala. We weren't sure where she slept and it's been an unusually cold year.

Me being me, my first thought after ordering this was, "I bet I could add a camera to this thing so we would know what goes in it." I had a spare Wyze Cam and I was planning to place the shelter near our basement window. So once it was set up, the camera was added and Lala moved in the very first day.

As I mentioned, It's been pretty cold this year. We've had night time temperatures in the teens. I have read, that cats, in an insulated enclosed space, can raise the ambient temperature with their body heat. So, I got to wondering, "How warm does Lala make the shelter?" And thus I have now embarked on a project to make a remote temperature sensor. Sure, I could buy one. But it's more fun to make my own.

I have an old Node MCU ESP 8266. This is essentially a WiFi capable Arduino. My plan is to wire a temperature sensor to it. I'm testing an LM35 I had in my parts bin right now. It's running a simple web server and I can get a quick temperature reading by curling it's address. Once I know it works as I want, I'll package it up somehow, stick it in Lala's shelter, and power it from the USB plug on the back of the Wyze Cam. Then I will have my answer.