Case for WLAN mousetrap alert

thingiverse

Have you got mice on your attic too? And won't you kill or poison these mice? But if you're setting a live trap there and you'll forget it so they will starve for a long time. That's not better either. Therefore I've upgraded a live trap from Amazon with a little circuit that sends a message via Wi-Fi/internet to my Telegram bot. (See the demonstration video here: https://youtu.be/tJTT1gJi4og) Telegram is my preferred social app. It's easy to create a bot there for your own ideas, so it's simple to send your bot a message with a link from any device. Since attics mostly have no LAN cable, I'm using Wi-Fi in my house. So an IoT device with Wi-Fi is needed. I'm using 'Wemos D1 mini', it costs no more than $4 from China. The genius idea of this project is that the trap doesn't need any power! If you're powering Wi-Fi chipsets to wait for closing the trap, you have to charge the batteries (AA/AAA) every four days. So my idea is not to power the device at all: Take a wooden clothespin, drill two thumbtacks into it and solder the plus cable to them. Open the clothespin and move a little plastic between the mouth. So nothing is powered. Tie a stitch from the plastic to the moving parts of your trap. If the trap closes, the stitch removes the plastic, the thumbtacks connect and the device can power up! After powering up, the device will register itself on your Wi-Fi network and call the URL of your Telegram bot. After this, the code sets the device into a deep sleep mode, so nearly no current is needed. Get your message, free the mouse (far away from your house :-) and move the plastic back into the clothespin. On your device, you have to code something so the device calls the URL you've prepared in your social app bot. You can find my example in this package. Be aware that you have to replace your Wi-Fi login data and your IDs from your bot before uploading it. For programming your Wi-Fi device search online. There are many free development tools and articles for doing this. So have fun and be friendly to the mice :-) Update: The first mouse is caught alive!