dog

48 Articles

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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Lint And Dog Hair Supercapacitor

April 30, 2016 by 27 Comments

[Mechanicus] has made a supercapacitor with a claimed 55 Farads per gram of active material. And he’s made it using dryer lint and dog hair. And he’s done it in 24 hours. That’s the short story. The longer story is an epic journey of self-discovery and dog ownership, and involves a cabin in the Wyoming backwoods.

So how did he do it?

He started with a home-made crucible that you maybe wouldn’t want to carry around in public as it bears more than a passing resemblance to a pipe bomb. Into that he packed his dog hair and lint, along with a generous helping of ammonia. An hour or two in a woodstove glowing red, and he’d made a rod of mostly carbon with the required high surface area. He sawed off a carbon slice, bathed it in lithium sulphate and potassium iodide electrolyte, and with the addition of a couple of pieces of stainless steel he had a supercapacitor.

Full details of his build can be found on the hackaday.io pages linked above, but there is also a handy YouTube video below the break.

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Robotic Pets Test An Automatic Pet Door

March 11, 2016 by 9 Comments

Lots of people get a pet and then hack solutions that help them care for their new friend, like an automatic door to provide access to the great outdoors. Then again, some people build the pet door first and then build the pets to test it.

It’s actually not quite as weird as it sounds. [Amir Avni] and his wife attended a recent GeekCon and entered the GeekCon Pets event. GeekCon is a cooperative rather than competitive hackathon that encourages useless builds as a means to foster community and to just have some fun. [Amir] and his wife wanted to build a full-featured automatic pet door, and succeeded – with NFC and an ESP8266, the stepper-powered door worked exactly as planned. But without any actual animal companions to test the system, they had to hack up a few volunteers. They came up with a 3D-printed dog and cat perched atop wireless cars, and with NFC tags dangling from their collars, the door was able to differentiate between the wandering ersatz animals. The video below the break shows the adorable plastic pals in action.

It’s clear from all the pet doors and automatic waterers and feeders we’ve seen that hackers love their pets, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time the pet itself was replaced by a robot. That’s fine for the test environment, but we’d recommend the real thing for production.

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Printing Puppy Prosthetics

May 4, 2015 by 13 Comments

When [aimzzz] met this puppy born without arms, the need for some assistive hardware was obvious. We love it that rapid prototyping techniques have become so accessible that something like building a wheelchair for a puppy is not just affordable, but a lot of fun too!

The main part of the projects is a cradle which will be comfortable for the dog. 3D printing is a great choice here because it can be customized to suit the needs of a particular dog. We remember seeing another dog named Derby who has 3D printed legs that make room for the biological legs that aren’t functioning correctly. In the case of this wheelchair, the cradle could be altered make room for legs.

The rest of the build is purely mechanical. Aluminum tubing, tubing connectors, and wheels combine with the printed cradle (and some padding material) to make for one sweet ride. It takes a bit of training to get used to, but as you can see after the break this makes mobility quite easy and intuitive for the pup.

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