dog

51 Articles

Bark Back IoT Pet Monitor

January 5, 2018 by 6 Comments

Does your pet get distressed when you’re not home? Or, perhaps their good behaviour slips when you’re not around and they cause a ruckus for the neighbours. Well, [jenfoxbot] has just such a dog, so she built a ‘bark back’ IoT pet monitor to keep an eye on him while she’s out.

The brains and backbone of the pet monitor is the ever-popular Raspberry Pi 3. A Sparkfun MEMS microphone breakout board listens for any unruly behaviour, with an MCP3002 analog to digital converter chip reading the mic input. Some trial-and-error coding allowed her to set a noise threshold that — once exceeded — will trigger an audio file, shushing her dog. It also logs events and uploads any status updates to a CloudMQTT server to be monitored while away from home. Her Imgur build album can be found here, and the GitHub project page is here if you want to build your own!

Check out the demo video after the break, that was probably confusing for her good dog, Marley.

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Reanimating Boney The Robot Dog

November 21, 2017 by 10 Comments

[Divconstructors] cashed in after Halloween and picked up a skeleton dog prop from the Home Depot, for the simple and logical purpose of turning it into a robot.

The first step was to cut apart the various body parts, followed by adding bearings to the joints and bolting in a metal chassis fabricated from 1/8″ aluminum stock. This is all pretty standard stuff in the Dr. Frankenstein biz. For electronics he uses a Mega with a bark-emitting MP3 shield on top of it. Separately, a servo control board manages the dozenish servos — not to mention the tail-wagging stepper.

[Divconstructors] actually bought two skeletons, one to be his protoype and the other to be the nice-looking build. However, we at Hackaday feel like he might have missed an opportunity: As any necromancer can tell you, a freakish combination of two skeletons beats out two normal skeletons any night of the week. Also, two words for you to consider: cyberdog ransomeware. We imagine you don’t really feel ransomware until there’s the family robodog ready to test out its high-torque jaw servos on your flesh. Of course if he were a real dog we could either remotely control him with a hot dog, or just give him a talking collar.

Dog-POV: Canine Speed Indicator

October 7, 2017 by 16 Comments

[Johan Beyers] built an elegantly simple Dog Speedometer project that uses a POV display to display a running dog’s speed without the benefit of an accelerometer. Using an Arduino (looks like it might be a D-love) and a line of 5 LEDs, [Johan] built a dirt-simple POV — 39 lines of code — that times out the flashes so that an immobile viewer sees the dog’s speed. How do you know your pup’s loping speed? That’s the beauty of this project.

Instead of putting all of the LEDs in a line, they are arranged in a V-shape. Because of this spatial offset, the patterns flashed out only “look right” at the right speed. Each number is flashed at a different speed, so you just look for the least distorted numeral.

[Johan]’s code does only what it needs to get the job done. The character data are stored in arrays that are played back directly to the pins of PORTD — avoiding most of the usual Arduino-style complexity with pin definitions and other foolery.

POV displays can be leveraged to add pizzazz to any project — this CD-ROM POV clock and this wind-powered POV weather station come to mind.

Dog-Operated Treat Dispenser

July 27, 2017 by 13 Comments

Every good dog is deserving of a treat. [Eliasbakken]’s dog [Moby] is a certified good boy,  so he designed a dispenser with a touchscreen that his dog can boop to treat himself when he isn’t barking up a ruckus.

Adding a touchscreen to a treat dispenser when a button would suffice is a little overkill, but we’re not here to judge. [Eliasbakken] is using a BeagleBone Black — a Linux-based development platform — as this dispenser’s brains, and a Manga touchscreen that is likely to see a lot of use.  A wood-like material called Vachromat was laser cut for the frame and glued together, while an RC servo with a 3D-printed jointed pushing arm to dispenses the treats. The dispenser’s hopper only holds fifteen, so we expect it will need to be refilled every fifteen seconds or so.

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The Internet Connected Dog Treat Machine

May 7, 2017 by 5 Comments

[Eric] and [Shirin] have a dog called [Pickles], who is the kind of animal that if you are a dog lover you will secretly covet. They evidently dote upon [Pickles], but face the problem that they can’t always be at home to express their appreciation of him. But rather than abandon him entirely, they’ve applied technology to the problem. [Eric] has built an Internet-connected dog treat dispenser, through which they can dispense treats, and watch the lucky mutt wolfing them down.

The body of the machine has been made with lasercut acrylic, and the dispenser mechanism is a rotating hopper driven by a stepper motor. The whole thing — in all its transparent glory — is controlled through a Raspberry Pi, which plays a sound clip of [Shirin] calling [Pickles] for his treat, records his dining enjoyment with its camera, and emails the result to his owners. Behind the scenes it hosts an MQTT server, which can be triggered via an iPhone app, Alexa, or the adafruit.io site. Imagine for a moment: “Alexa, feed my dog!”. It has a ring to it.

He makes the point that this machine is not simply limited to dispensing treats, it could be used to engage [Pickles] in more activities. He hints at a future project involving a ball throwing device (have you ever seen such joy from a dog). There’s no substitute for being there with your dog, but maybe with this device they can make their dog’s life a little less of, well, a dog’s life.

You can see the machine in action in the video we’ve posted below the break.

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Remote Controlling A Dog

January 21, 2017 by 40 Comments

Until the industrial revolution, humans made use of animals to make our labor easier. This is still seen in some niche areas, like how no machine yet has been invented that’s as good at sniffing out truffles as pigs are. [William] has hearkened back to humanity’s earlier roots, but in a more modern twist has made something of a general purpose dog that could feasibly do any work imaginable. Now his dog is remote-controlled.

[William] accomplished the monumental task in a literally cartoonish fashion using the old trope of hanging a hot dog in front of something’s face to get them to chase it. The attachment point was fitted with a remote control receiver and an actuator to get the hanging hot dog to dangle a little bit more to the dog’s right or left, depending on where the “operator” wants the dog to go. [William]’s bulldog seems to be a pretty good sport about everything and isn’t any worse for wear either.

Believe it or not, there has been some actual research done into remote controlling animals, although so far it’s limited to remote-controlled cockroaches. We like the simplicity of the remote-controlled dog, though, but don’t expect to see these rigs replacing leashes anytime soon!

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SpotMini Struts Its Stuff

July 1, 2016 by 17 Comments

Boston Dynamics, the lauded robotics company famed for its ‘Big Dog’ robot and other machines which push mechanical dexterity to impressive limits have produced a smaller version of their ‘Spot’ robot dubbed ‘SpotMini’.

A lightweight at 55-65 lbs, this quiet, all-electric robot lasts 90 minutes on a full charge and boasts partial autonomy — notably in navigation thanks to proprioception sensors in the limbs. SpotMini’s most striking features are its sleek new profile and manipulator arm, showing off this huge upgrade by loading a glass into a dishwasher and taking out some recycling.

Robots are prone to failure, however, so it’s good to know that our future overlords are just as susceptible to slipping on banana peels as we humans are.

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