Wouldn’t it be awesome to get texts from your dog? Good news, everybody: We found a techy DIY tutorial for that! Your dog can now send you selfies throughout the day ?
How to build a Dog Selfie Camera
Greg Baugues built the Dog Selfie Camera that sends a photo to your phone via MMS. He essentially built a box with a big red button that’s connected to a USB camera.
With lots of treats he trained his pooch to press the button. Every time the dog paws at it, a picture is taken and saved to Dropbox. From there, the messaging service Twilio sends the picture as an MMS.
Here’s what he used for this project (beware, it gets techy here!):
- Arduino Yun (if you’re not familiar: this is a “microcontroller” that is like a small computer controlling the camera and the MMS-sending)
- Empty Cigar Box as a storage for the Arduino
- “Massive Arcade Button” he put into the lid of the cigar box (the dog will press this to trigger the camera)
- Webcam
- Small Breadboard, some Jumper Cables and a 10k Ohm resistor to connect the button and camera to the Arduino
- Micro USB-Cable & Micro SD-Card
- Free Dropbox & Twilio Account
Greg wrote about this dog-selfie experiment on Twilio’s Blog and offers his code samples there. If you’re familiar with a bit of coding and putting together hardware components like an Arduino board and a camera, you shouldn’t have any problems to build one yourself after reading it! It’s definitely on our DIY list ?
Just interested in the final product? Watch this:
tldr;
Greg Baugues invented a Dog Selfie Camera that sends you the pictures via MMS. You can build it yourself with his tutorial and code samples.
