[Becky Stern] came up with a way to make sure you and your dog are getting enough exercise. It’s a dog collar mounted GPS that measures how far you have walked. Just set your target distance and the progress bar in the middle of this flower will let you know when you reached it.
The most obvious piece of hardware is the OLED board which is sticking out like a sore thumb. But if you’d like to be a little more discreet you could forego the full-featured display for some carefully places LEDs to make up a circular progress bar. The GPS module itself fits well in the center of the flower, which [Becky] shows us how to make out of wire-edged ribbon. Hidden on the other side is an ATmega23u4 breakout board running the Arduino bootloader.
If you’re interested in sewables and textiles [Becky] uses a lot of basic techniques that are good to learn. Check it out in the clip after the break. She’s always shown a remarkable ability to develop projects which won’t scare away the villagers in the way our wire-sprouting breadboard hacks sometimes do.
a button to set the target in 100M intervals would be great. on click to set, click until it gets to the target figure and after 5 secs it sets
I think the owner should have to wear all of that crap around their neck. Poor dog.
Never been on a multiday hike with a canine friend?
http://www.rei.com/search?query=dog+packs
They don’t mind over a dozen pounds while doing something they like.
What I actually don’t understand is why she codes calc_dist function when the TinyGPS has its own function already coded, compiled and using flash memory space called TinyGPS::distance_between.
Could be something to do with the precision required, because the distance travelled between updates is so small.
She appears to be using Haversine which is supposed to give pretty good results if you only have low precision arithmetic available. The way she’s implemented it is not particularly optimized though.
What about some rain proof ?
Atmega32u4 perhaps?
Now you’ll be beaten by your dog on runkeeper !
This is not a bad idea. Its too bad this doesn’t transmit to a map or other receiver so hunters or others who use their dogs off leash could use this to pin point where their dog is exactly. This would also work great to be able to help track lost dogs.