Category Archives: dog

[James Bruton] Is Making A Dog: OpenDog Project

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There was a time when a two-legged walking robot was the thing to make. But after seeing years of Boston Dynamic’s amazing four-legged one’s, more DIYers are switching to quadrupeds. Now we can add master DIY robot builder [James Bruton] to the list with his openDog project. What’s exciting here is that with [James’] extensive robot-building background, this is more like starting the challenge from the middle rather than the beginning and we should see exciting results sooner rather than later.

Thus far [James] has gone through the planning stage, having iterated through a few versions using Fusion 360, and …read more

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Smashing Security #078: Hounds hunt hackers, too-human Google AI, and ethnic recognition tech – WTF?

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Dogs are trained to sniff out hackers’ hard drives, facial recognition takes an ugly turn, and do you trust Google to book your hair appointment?
All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by computer securi… Continue reading Smashing Security #078: Hounds hunt hackers, too-human Google AI, and ethnic recognition tech – WTF?→

Bark Back IoT Pet Monitor

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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 …read more

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Reanimating Boney the Robot Dog

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[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 separate servo control board manages the dozenish servos — not to mention the tail-wagging stepper. …read more

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Dog-POV: Canine Speed Indicator

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[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 …read more

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Dog-Operated Treat Dispenser

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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 …read more

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The Internet Connected Dog Treat Machine

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[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 …read more

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Remote Controlling A Dog

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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 …read more

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