My cat seems to be sleeping all the time, does yours ?

In fact most of the activities of a cat occur at night, then it is difficult to know his habits or if he changes his behavior during your absence.

All these questions, plus the sharing of this data with family members are at the origin of the catmoves Azure Mobile Service.

As a cloud service, catmoves has three parts:

1. An Azure Mobile Service URL
2. A dedicated motion sensor with REST capabilities
3. A REST client application to access the data anywhere

The motion sensor

Motion is detected with an HCSR501 PIR sensor connected to a 86duino Educake board.

The HCSR501 is an autonomous sensor with its own ajustable detection period and range, I set up the minimum period which is about 5 - 6 seconds (minimum time between two detections). The Educake sofware is based on the Arduino model, I set up the loop period to 1 second which is far enough to detect all moves. As the Educake has an Ethernet connector, the software uses the Arduino Ethernet Library to implement a REST client sending POST commands to the Azure Mobile Service, motion data is collected and uploaded every hour.

The REST client application

To collect data, a Win32 REST client based on the socket API sends GET requests, the Azure timestamp is also collected and a CSV file with all data and timestamps is created on the local drive and can be viewed with a spreadsheet application..

 Yes it moves !!