Surely Instagram would be the more appropriate venue for pictures of shit.
I love this project far more than I should, and now I’m wondering about setting up something similar on the chook feeder so it can tweet when it needs refilling…
Well, good! You’re way ahead of me, I see.
Yep, you are totally nutballs*. Which is great, because that means that you might be on board with (or at least be able to make use of) my crazy idea: use a self-cleaning litterbox. After the cat leaves the box, it basically drags a rake through the litter and pushes any solids into a waste receptacle at one end, which is then covered with a lid. Now, this is designed to be used with clumping litter, so that both poop and pee get raked up, the idea being to make cleaning as “hands-free” as possible. But it seems to me you could use it with non-clumping litter as well. Then, presumably only the poop would get scooped out. Of course, the waste receptacle is attached to the box, and so the poop would still be contributing to the total weight. But it appears that, instead of attaching it to the box, you could replace it with, say, a chute that drops the poop into a receptacle that’s sitting next to the weight platform. To ascertain poop weight, you could either compare pre- and post-raking weights, or simply build a second weight platform for the poop receptacle. Now, this presumes that your cat would accept using this type of box and litter, which is no small hurdle. It also means that the poop will be neither buried nor lidded, but just sitting uncovered, which also might be difficult for your cat (and you) to accept. Still, this is potentially one method of poop/pee differentiation. And the gas sensor would still come in handy, because it might be able to detect pee in cases when the weight was too small to register.
*N.B.: I am also totally nutballs.