Mouse Trap Indicator

I've been thinking for a while about how to make a mouse trap that turns ON an LED after it's set off.  The reason being for all of us who have a couple traps in the basement or garage that you don't necessarily check everyday.  I wanted something that would get my attention that I caught a mouse without having to go right up to it.  I also wanted to do that as simple as possible (ie no arduino to post a tweet).  Here's what I came up with.

Step 1 Materials & Tools

One of the biggest things I wanted was to make sure I used Items I already had around and were fairly common.  The only exception was I did buy some mini-clothes pins instead of using a regular size one because I liked the compactness of it.  And I could mount it on top.  But you can use a regular one and either attach it to the bottom of the mousetrap, or the side.

 - An LED
 - Duct tape
 - wire
 - 3V battery & case (I pulled this one off an old motherboard)
 - clothes pin (you can get these as most major craft stores)
 - mouse trap

Tools:

 - Soldering iron
 - glue gun
 - wire cutters
 - helping hands are a plus

Comments

[The G Man]

Very nice project. Sounds good ilpug

[appsman]

I've thought about this same problem, especially for traps in my roof crawlspace where I don't want to go looking unless I know I've caught a rat. What I think would work pretty well is a little 500kHz oscillator, feeding a little antenna, that's gated on/off by some logic at say 1Hz. Then you could tune to the bottom of an AM radio dial, listening for a gated unmodulated carrier. Radio hiss would turn on and off at the gate clock when the trap is sprung.

The LED idea is of course simpler and works fine if you can see, though I'd stick a resistor to cut the LED current way down for max battery life. Since you'll likely be looking at traps in the dark, even 1mA of LED current should be easy to spot.

[skimmo]

the smell should tell you in a couple of days! =D

[ve2vfd]

I love the idea, but I would probably put a buzzer or some sort of chime as warning device. I've also forgotten about a mousetrap a few days and it wasn't pretty... :)

[iglesia777]

Hi ve2vfd,

I thought about that too. But then I realized I'm most likely to catch mice at night when they're out and about. And I'd like to avoid the chance I'd be woken up for that, even though there would be that little bit of gratification knowing it worked.

But I'm a light sleeper. Plus I have a 1yr old. So I really wasn't risking waking him up either. I'm sure you could make it quiet enough that you'd only hear it if you were in the same room. So good idea.

Thanks for the comment!

[ilpug]

for those of us without a need to sleep or small children, you could take one of those speaker things from out of a musical greeting card and wire it up to a repeating circuit. also, the speaker thing has a switch like the one you made already on it, so you could just use the unit on its own. the only problem is that the songs in musical greeting cards are fantastically annoying. by the way, great project. to take it to yet another level, you could make it so that the trap would send out a radio signal to a central control board, which would light an LED to notify. that way you could have a bunch of traps used at once and know which ones you had to go empty.

[theawesomeninja]

Then, if you set mousetraps in consistent positions, you could know where the caught mouse is from your bedroom

[Foxtrot70]

Great to see another project made with, "The Handyman's Secret Weapon"...DUCT TAPE !