My first design involved simply wiring the traps themselves so that when they are set they complete the circuit. But this relied on metal simply touching, without that much force. Over time they started to not be that reliable due to corrosion or what not. This is it, years later, looks pretty nasty:
I decided to build a new one but I could not find the Victor traps locally (ended up ordering some) and the ones I had use a different kind of metal that was near impossible to solder to. It has some kind of coating. Even with lot of flux and sanding it was not a very reliable solder joint.
So I opted for a different approach, basically I have two terminals, the +5v and then the 3 monitoring channels. I then have a strip of foil paper that goes within the trap and when it trips it will pull it apart. I found these white board peg magnets that work perfectly for keeping the foil on the terminals. So here is the new unit:
The terminals just go to an ethernet jack, to make it easy to unplug/replug when I catch something.
All set and ready to go.
Within like 5 minutes of putting it up I got a trip notice, I figured it was something that got loose. I checked. Nope, actually caught one! The screenshot above is yet another one that I presumably caught, but I did not go check yet.
Not going to embed this one as some people might not like to see a picture of a dead animal, but pic is here.
Honestly I don't really like killing them, but not really much else I can do, they can cause damage up there.
Also I applied like 5-6 coats of lacquer to these, so that when there is blood and guts(tm) spilled it will not embed in the wood. I was not even sure what to do with the old one as I did not even want to cut it and get all that on my saw blade (not to mention releasing airborne pathogens etc) so I just threw it in the trash as is. We have ridiculously high taxes, they can more than afford to repair the garbage trucks because of people like me that put ridiculous stuff like this in the garbage.
The back end of this is basically an Arduino that's connected to a server. I actually want to redesign that part to make it more modular, but right now I have a few other alarm points on it such as monitoring Hydro, UPS battery voltage etc.
This is where it terminates at:
Eventually all that will be moved to a Nema cabinet as it's actually kinda a mess now.
With all this it's also crossed my mind to use high voltage for instantly killing them and this has been suggested before, but the thing with that is it could be a fire hazard as it's basically leaving a high voltage device unattended in the attic. So I opted for the snap traps despite them needing to be reset. Idealy I need to figure out how they're coming in the attic in first place. I suspect they might be getting in through the garage, if they can climb the walls inside they can probably make it into the attic somewhere up there where the roof meets the firewall or something.
Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6670, old post ID:38931
