This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Bastelix-Lab on 2026-07-05 10:12:22+00:00.
My two cats — Susi (British Shorthair) and Loki (Maine Coon) — refuse to drink from a bowl like normal cats. They want fresh running water from the bathroom faucet. So for years my "solution" was to open the tap just a tiny bit, so a thin stream runs for them. The actual problem: **me.** I constantly forgot to close it again. More than once the tap ran all night — or the whole day while I was at work. That's a lot of wasted water for two spoiled cats.
First attempt was a PIR motion sensor + Zigbee solenoid valve. Worked great, except a PIR can't tell a cat from a human, so the faucet also opened every time I walked into the bathroom. Not ideal.
The fix: actual object detection.
Camera: Freenove ESP32-S3 WROOM CAM (16 MB flash / 8 MB PSRAM) with an OV5640, streaming MJPEG over RTSP at 1280x720, ~10 fps. No H.264 on the S3, but for a single camera Frigate handles MJPEG just fine.
Detection: Frigate + Coral USB TPU on my home server, detect at 5 fps. A zone drawn exactly on the sink, so a cat lounging on the toilet lid next to it doesn't count.
Action: Home Assistant listens for cat in the sink zone → opens a smart valve on the water line. When the cat leaves there's a 45 s run-on timer, plus a hard 3-minute safety cutoff in case Frigate decides a towel is a cat at 3 am. And an input_boolean master switch so the automation doesn't water *me* down while I brush my teeth.
Bonus: the line runs through a countertop water filter, so the cats re drinking filtered water. Yes, they drink better water than I do.
(The ESP32 is still a bare board on the wall — the case is in the 3D printer queue, as is tradition.)
Funniest bug: Loki the Maine Coon is apparently too big to be a cat. The COCO model occasionally classifies him as dog (screenshot attached — the model is *confident* about it, too). Since there's no dog in this household, I just added dog to the tracked objects. Problem solved, dignity of the cat questionable.
Happy to share the Frigate config, the HA automations (4 of them: open, run-on timer, close, safety cutoff) and the PlatformIO firmware if anyone's interested.