Background/Overview

Winter in Vermont means rodents, especially mice, migrate into our homes to stay warm. While standard "kill" mousetraps are commercially available, there is not much available for "No-kill" mousetraps that are small enough to put in the hard-to-reach places that mice feel comfortable travelling through. The next problem with catching live mice is that if the method of containment is not made of metal, it is likely that if given enough time, the mouse will be able to chew their way out and be free to cause more havoc in your home or if they are unable to chew their way out sometimes younger mice will try too hard to get out and actually perish from the exhaustion.

 

This mousetrap has an RF transmitter that links to an RF receiver that can be placed in a different area of your home that will notify the user when the trap has been tripped. This way when a mouse has been caught, they can be brought outside and disposed of in a timely manner that will mitigate the amount of damage to the trap itself, ensure the mice don't die from exhaustion, as well as ensuring the user does not need to continuously check the trap, which could scare the mice away from entertaining the idea to enter the small container with the promise of something good to eat. 

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With efficiency in mind during the design of this project, the use of a rechargeable 18650 battery was deemed to be the best battery for the job due to its high mAh rating, which allowed the use of a single battery instead of having several in parallel and in series to reach the needed voltages to operate the circuit.