Jennifer Fox, founder of FoxBot Industries, uses a Raspberry Pi pet monitor to check the sound levels of her home while she is out, allowing her to keep track of when her dog Marley gets noisy or agitated, and to interact with the gorgeous furball accordingly.

Bark Back Project Demo A quick overview and demo of the Bark Back, a project to monitor and interact with Check out the full tutorial here: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/bark-back-interactive-pet-monitor For any licensing requests please contact licensing@break.com

Marley, bark!

Using a Raspberry Pi 3, speakers, SparkFun’s MEMS microphone breakout board, and an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), the IoT Pet Monitor is fairly easy to recreate, all thanks to Jennifer’s full tutorial on the FoxBot website.

Building the pet monitor

In a nutshell, once the Raspberry Pi and the appropriate bits and pieces are set up, you’ll need to sign up at CloudMQTT — it’s free if you select the Cute Cat account. CloudMQTT will create an invisible bridge between your home and wherever you are that isn’t home, so that you can check in on your pet monitor.

Within the project code, you’ll be able to calculate the peak-to-peak amplitude of sound the microphone picks up. Then you can decide how noisy is too noisy when it comes to the occasional whine and bark of your beloved pup.

Next you can import sounds to a preset song list that will be played back when the volume rises above your predefined threshold. As Jennifer states in the tutorial, the sounds can easily be recorded via apps such as Garageband, or even on your mobile phone.

Using the pet monitor

Whenever the Bark Back IoT Pet Monitor is triggered to play back audio, this information is fed to the CloudMQTT service, allowing you to see if anything is going on back home.

And as Jennifer recommends, a update of the project could include a camera or sensors to feed back more information about your home environment.

If you’ve created something similar, be sure to let us know in the comments. And if you haven’t, but you’re now planning to build your own IoT pet monitor, be sure to let us know in the comments. And if you don’t have a pet but just want to say hi…that’s right, be sure to let us know in the comments.