A familiar theme for me is having a fun idea and then later finding myself a bit too committed to the bit. That's what happened here with my cat, Checo.

It all started with a simple curiosity: just how much does Checo work next to me? He seemed to always be there, clocking in hours by sleeping in his circle next to my desk. With a free weekend, I decided to turn this into a project to track his effort.

Hardware setup for tracking Checo

To measure Checo's presence, I built a system using a Raspberry Pi W Zero 2 and a Raspberry Pi AI Camera. The software stack includes using DynamoDB, a custom trained ONNX AI Model, API Gateway, and Python in Lambda functions and on the RPi.

Checo hard at work, seen from camera

The camera captures photos at ~40 second intervals, which are then processed to determine if there's a cat in the image via the custom AI model run on the edge. Based on the results it may add an entry to our database with details about which cat is in the image.

When a user visits the website, we use API Gateway to hit a Lambda function to calculate the time worked and display that to the user.

Checo in action

It's a fun way to keep my manager, the Checman, on task!

Work time displayed on a Vestaboard

See Checo's current status here: Checo Live