Make magazine profiles a fellow (by the alias ‘Nbolt’) that wanted to be able to remotely give his dog a treat. So he came up with an interesting solution that includes a robot, an audio converter and MSN instant messenger running on a laptop in the house with the dog. When you see this thing you won’t quite think of it as a ‘rube goldberg machine‘ type device, but it is, erm…interesting.
When a user types ‘treat’ into the IM window, the other end of the IM conversation is running on a laptop tied into this configuration, then a device connected to the laptop is activated to generate a tone. That tone is the ‘trigger’ for the Lego MindStorms NXT robot to activate; it will then pick out a dog treat from a bin, then drop it from a table into the dog bowl, resulting in “one happy dog”.
The inventor says “I have also setup some basic commands so you can IM “sit” “come here” and “speak,” and see if she does them before giving the treat, but so far she doesn’t listen to any of them”.
Here’s the YouTube video of the end to end demonstration, with dog.
Related posts:
- South Koreans Clone Their Sniffer Dog
- Boston Dynamics Big Dog
- Monkeys Managing Machines. Or, Monkey Brain Hardwired To Robotic Arm, Feeds Self.
- Dual Screen Laptops
- A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 "Hot Dog Stand" Color Scheme
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