Mouse repellent machines… anybody else enjoy getting creative?
 

So I’m sick of always having to worry about mice in our home garage where we keep the cars we work on. We are surrounded on 2 sides by fields and woods, home to many curious mice. We take our usual steps with the cars we keep in our storage building (steel wool in all engine entry/exit places, cut up urinal mats in/on/under our cars) and have been successful since switching to that method.

Our home garage mice are a little more persistent as they like the slightly heated garage when it’s 10° out. While working in there I’d rather not have it smell like a urinal either. I’ve recently been tinkering with 120V AC short cycle timers connected to strobed led’s and 12/24v DC vibration motors. Total cost isn’t much over the $30 cycle timer.

Anyways, I set the cycle timer to run for something like 30s every 5min. so I get a 30s run of strobe led’s under the car and the vibration motor mounted to a sheet metal base I leave in the trunk. The vibration is currently a little excessive so I’m toning it down a bit. So far so good for the last 2mos or so. This is usually the time of year when the mice start migrating in.

Last week I got the idea to “automate” things a bit more and started programming a microcontroller ($10 Raspberry Pi Pico) to become a “smart” deterrent system. Essentially, for a few bucks you can add a sensor to the system and automate things. I’m currently testing a $2 HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Module triggering strobe led’s, a tiny 12v motor that creates noise and vibration, and possibly a beeper/buzzer. This is in addition to scheduled cycles.

I hate the thought of mice in the garage, but the market is actually flooded with cheap yet high quality electronics and it’s kinda fun being creative.

Just bult me 1st 5-Gal Bucket trap for mice and rats. Not sure if we need it, but going to dind out soon.

From what I've seen a well designed bucket trap will deplete the local population .. they will march in to their death endlessly if it's kept baited.

I have one of these, works great.
https://www.willowerwis.com/products...O2l8N1nqOQsJAs

Got them here also
 

I kill 3-4 a night at work and in my garage. Their bites are very itchy. I bought one of those bug zappers with mosquito attractant. It's useless. Mosquitos kill more people than any other creature you would think someone would come up with a real effective trap.
At my work mice were getting into the candy and we thought it was a couple of them, turns out it was 10! We live trapped most of them and released them in an open field. The maintenance guy set out electronic kill traps that worked pretty good also.

My Bucket trap was empty this AM. 5-Gallon, 2-cleeted ramps, lid cut and shafted to spin, with peanut butter.

I got the led strobe working off the microcontroller but that’s it so far. I’m having trouble interfacing the ultrasonic distance sensor to tie it in as a trigger. I can get distance reads across the room and get the reads waving my hand in front of it, but that’s where I’m stuck. I can go the easy route and run a cheap standalone PIR sensor like motion lights have, but I kind of want an all-in-one solution.

I honestly can’t believe a $3 led module can output this much light. I’ve played with the strobe intensity and timing to come up with some patterns that are so intense even I feel disoriented. It’s kind of crazy.

HIS ... takes a bit, that first mouse has to leave the scent trail for the others to follow.

Entropy ... what kind of MC are you using? I've got a mini-cnc project going and I'm becoming pretty familiar with the arduino. So far I've got X Y motors working, using Universal G-code Sender on the lap top and grbl flashed on the arduino.

We got an influx of chipmunks living in the garage, and picked up one of these to eliminate them:
https://www.victorpest.com/rat-zappe...-trap-rzc001-4

It has worked great-

....I put the bucket in the Lower Barn, next to a cut-wood scrap pile (suspended on a iron fence), because hay and dirt mounded under the iron grate.

Could be chipmunks, a rabbit, and rats if they all get along. I just never see any damages, nor nusaince.

Some critter dragged a bunch of hay under the iron grate.

This sounds good... please update the thread if it works.

The bucket trap works, I've used it a number of times. You can use it in winter by adding some antifreeze to the water, as long as you don't have it somewhere that other animals like cats or dogs could get into it.

When using for chipmunks, you can omit the rolling peanut butter mechanism. Put some seed, like birdseed at the top of the ramp and put some in the water, the chipmunks will try to reach it or jump into it, not realizing that it's floating in water, and drown.

John- I’m using a Raspberry Pi Pico flashed with MicroPython via Thonny. I can get individual components working the way I want but I’m struggling with the “if” command and the ultrasonic sensor. I think I’m just in over my head right now because I’m trying to get a distance measuring device to output a hi/low based on a momentary deviation in distance instead of something like a PIR sensor that just always scans and says “Movement? —-> trigger high level”.

I was going to make it arduino based but this latest generation of R Pi solid state MC’s are just ridiculously cheap yet feature packed (instead of the usual Pi stuff where you’re practically running a tiny PC).

Please keep me updated on the CNC. That’s one of my next projects.

Yeah the code is always a struggle for me, never learned C very well. I typically find some example code and tweak it.

Yep, eventually I'll post a small thread about it, hopefully will move to the tini4 (sp?) since the new grblHAL won't run on arduino and the grblHAL will do six axis. I guess that's a bit optimistic considering I haven't even built 3 axis yet :)