Constructing a rodent-friendly catch-and-release mousetrap with Arduino

Rodents, together with mice, are problematic. They’ll trigger important injury to your own home by chewing up wires, partitions, and insulation, whereas abandoning unsanitary droppings that current a well being hazard. However these of us who love animals are reluctant to make the most of conventional mousetraps. Not solely are these deadly, however they’ll additionally trigger a variety of struggling alongside the best way. That’s why Trapsticles constructed this rodent-friendly catch-and-release mousetrap.

This mousetrap doesn’t kill rodents or hurt them in any respect. It merely traps them in a big field, so the home-owner can relocate them. To maintain a mouse from simply coming again, it’s essential to launch them distant. However that’s rather a lot higher than killing them. It could even be doable to donate the captured mice to pet shops to make use of as feeders. That’s nonetheless a bit of ugly, however nature is like that.

The idea right here is straightforward: it’s a large field and the highest is a entice door actuated by a servo motor. Bait (like peanut butter) lures mice onto the entice door, which then swings all the way down to drop the critter inside. The door then closes so the mouse can’t escape — although one wily rodent was in a position to climb out of Trapsticles’s entice.

An Arduino Nano board controls the servo. It detects the presence of a mouse (or any small warmblooded creature) utilizing a PIR sensor. Blinder-style shields stop the PIR sensor from recognizing something that isn’t on the entice door, so a passing individual doesn’t set it off.

As you may see within the video, this works effectively and is rather more humane than the traps at your native ironmongery shop.