A cat food bowl checker using Claude vision
Twice a day Home Assistant photographs a cat's bowl and asks Claude Sonnet how much kibble is left, then reports how well the cat has eaten.
The full story
Twice a day, Home Assistant takes a snapshot from a cat feeder camera, crops it to the bowl and sends it to Claude Sonnet 4 through the LLM Vision integration to estimate how much whole kibble is left. The percentage sets a bowl level and a message about how well Pepsi the cat has eaten, sent as a notification.
The key was the prompt: Claude is told to count only whole kibble, ignore crumbs and the bowl's reflection, and return just a number. Over 90% left triggers a "might be sick?" alert.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Cat Food Bowl Checker | LLM Vision: Image Analyzer
The maker's post on r/homeassistant.
The poster has deleted it, but the original is still readable (it can take a few seconds to load): archived copy of Reddit: Cat Food Bowl Checker | LLM Vision: Image Analyzer (opens in a new tab)