BuzzBuzz Dog Collar

We don't get out much these days, but when we do we're always a bit worried about what our dogs are doing while they're home alone. Mostly the worry was for our youngest dog that we got during the pandemic and who really hasn't ever spent any significant time alone because, as mentioned, we don't get out much these days.

The first few times we left him home alone we came back to some damage - things like his having chewed on things he shouldn't have or clawed at the door to the garage leaving big scratches. Our older dog, Zelda, had been left alone plenty prior to the pandemic, so we weren't worried about her, but Carrot was clearly up to no good.

We spent some time working on him, giving him other things to chew on, testing him with super short absences and such, but we wanted a way to try to calm him down or reward good behavior while we were gone so we picked up a Eufy Pet Camera D605 (which I think has now been discontinued) and it let us watch what the dogs were up to and even toss them treats and talk to them using the app.

What we soon discovered is that while young Carrot was indeed nervously pacing or howling in sadness, our older dog Zelda was no angel either. Turns out, she would stand at attention by the window and bark at anything and everything (or more likely at nothing).

Presumably, this was making Carrot even more nervous than he already was. Probably they were both acting as a feedback loop for each other.

While the pet camera allowed us to try to talk to them or tell them no, or reward calm sitting with treats, Zelda, at least, was too smart for it. She knew we weren't there and she knew there wasn't any consequence to not listening to the weird robot camera thing.

Zelda is no stranger to being too smart for her own good. We've occasionally had issues with her ignoring calls to come back inside for much the same reason - she knew if we didn't have shoes on we probably weren't going to actually come get her. So to help correct that, we got a wireless collar that lets you vibrate or beep the dog with a remote control. It worked like a charm - after maybe a half dozen times, she figured out that she should listen to us.

The problem was, we couldn't use the collar to stop her barking when we were away from home because it works with a short range radio signal and there's no app.

Then one day while we were out eating and watching the dog barking her head off at home, I had the idea to make a wifi-enabled collar we could activate remotely when we saw her doing that on the pet camera.

How hard could it be?

Way back in June I picked up a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 which is basically a whole little computer on a chip the size of my thumb. It has WiFi, Bluetooth, 32 bits, 160 MHz, 512KB of RAM, 4MB of Flash, integrated battery charging circuit, a bunch of I/O ports, and more. I don't even think this is the most powerful or cheapest or top-est of the line thing out there, either. It's impressive and mundane all at the same time!

I thought maybe I could use it to build my WiFi collar idea - all I needed was a way to vibrate and buzz and some simple code to toggle them on and off and a battery and a way to mount it on a dog... okay, so it's not entirely straightforward but it seemed doable.

I ordered some little vibrating motor boards and buzzer boards, some wire and connectors, some rechargeable batteries of various sizes, and spent much of June and July just watching the little thing blink on my desk.

Eventually I got up the nerve to try getting it talking on WiFi - I guess I expected this to be a huge pain, but weirdly the Arduino libraries (or whoever supplies these things) turned out to be super trivial to use. Since I wasn't making a polished product here, I could get away with just hardcoding my SSID and password and in like 3 lines of code it was connected to WiFi and had an IP address!

A few hours later I had an entire web server running on it - there are Arduino libraries for basically everything!

A day or so after that, I had a simple web interface with buttons to blink the LED, vibrate the motor, buzz the buzzer, or any combination of things I wanted.

The tricky part was figuring out how I was going to mount everything on my dog. I spent a long time playing around with all the pieces of the circuit on my desk like a puzzle trying to decide how I could pack them into a small enough space that I could 3D print a container for it all.

Eventually I came up with an idea and spent an entire Saturday and Sunday modeling and test-printing a case and lid prototype in Tinkercad (I should really learn a better tool).

After a few iterations, I was able to stuff all the electronics in the box, thread it on the collar, and screw the parts together. It worked!

The only remaining thing to do was setup some basic password protection and poke a hole through my router so we could access the web interface from outside the house - and then test it!

So yesterday afternoon we all piled in the car to go grab some fast food as an excuse to leave the dogs home alone and test the collar. My wife watched the camera on her phone and used my phone with the web interface for the collar. The moment Zelda barked, she got beeped and boy she wasn't expecting that! She jumped backward in surprise and immediately stopped barking - lol.

She relapsed maybe 3 or 4 times and then gave up and went to lie down on her bed. She very quickly learned her lesson - so I think it worked!

Obviously this isn't a finished "product" by any means - it has loads of usability problems - but it was fun and I'm glad I did it. It's not the most practical thing - it really needs to be used with a camera, obviously, and it being WiFi means it's probably not much good outside (never mind it's not even remotely waterproof).

Still, though, it's amazing that it's possible to have a bonkers hardware idea like this and to be able to make it all at home.