When I was in Melbourne last week, my friend Frank gave me an AWS IoT Button to play with. The Snook has been on a home automation tear lately so I told him we’d need to come up something cool to do with it. Less than 24 hours later, he messaged me:

Today the Button was still in its box, taunting me, so I decided it was time for action. A few short hours of fiddling later, the “Smart” Litterbox was born!

Full details are over at Github, but in a nutshell: whenever we clean the litterbox, we single-click the button to update a timestamp in DynamoDB. A double-click creates a task to buy litter bags in Todoist, and a long-press creates one to buy litter. Once a day, a serverless Lambda function checks the timestamp in the database and sends a reminder email if it’s more than two days in the past.

Pretty cool, eh? Now I just need to get some more Buttons!