Virtual dog

2020-09-08T15:50:50Z

My parents have a summer house in southern Poland, they got it from my grandmas sister who didn't have her own children. But after we emigrated to Germany in August 1989 nobody lived there permanently anymore.

We had many problems that people broke in and destroyed things every now and then until my dad made me buy IP Cameras and we set up a radio internet connection to be able to monitor it from abroad.

The whole monitoring thing grew with time and I added a Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi to be able to do things like rebooting the cheap Chinese cameras when they hung after a couple of weeks, turn on the lights on and off and so on.

If you're interested in Home Assistant check out the talk I gave at foss-north 2018 about it.

Anyway, I did have a motion sensor in the house and in the basement to inform us if someone would get in and last year I added another one outside to be informed if someone jumps over the fence. But it was quite sensitive and saw even people who walk on the street outside of the fence (also our property).

Even earlier my dad made me connect a loudspeaker outside so he could play music there over the internet (it's far to the next neighbor so it doesn't disturb them). And we put a Button there so he would be able to press it and sound of a dog barking would play through that speaker.

Some time later it occurred to me that we don't need my dad pressing the button manually, we could just combine the motion sensor with it and the virtual dog was born. The last two weeks I was there for vacation and installed a Network video recorder (NVR) so we could record what's going on there and wouldn't need to monitor manually.

It ended up being quite interesting to see that some of our neighbors interact with that virtual dog and even gave him a name, they call him Kubuś.

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You can hear the guy calling the dog by name at the start of the video. Same thing the next day:

download movie

Here he says: "Kubuś, chodź, chodź" which means something like "Winnie, come, come". I translated the name like that because Winnie-the-Pooh is called Kubuś Puchatek in Polish.