Sometimes dogs like to mistake furniture for a toilet. Out of fear for my new shoe cupboards, I decided to make a doorbell for my dog, Bobby, to push

Build an IoT Doggy Alarm so Your Furry Friend Can Tell You They Want To Go Outside

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2022-07-06 10:30:06

Sometimes dogs like to mistake furniture for a toilet. Out of fear for my new shoe cupboards, I decided to make a doorbell for my dog, Bobby, to push to alert me when he needed to go outside. It took a little while (and cost me a lot of treat-based incentives) to get him to push it, but soon enough, Bobby would stand by the door... and wait until I could see him to push the button. This got me wondering: could I build something where I would be notified when he stands close to the door?

In this guide, I will show you how to build a sensor capable of detecting your fluffy friend’s proximity to your door then send you a text message alert, using an Arduino and Twilio’s Programmable SMS.

It’s that time of day. Your dog wants to go outside and stands by the door hoping you’ll notice. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tag that your dog is wearing has a unique ID and emits a signal that only triggers the WiFi enabled ESP32 board when it is in close proximity. The board then executes a request to the Twilio REST API to send an SMS with a loving message from your dog to you.

First things first, let’s open up your Arduino IDE, plug in your ESP32 using the micro-USB cable, and make sure the board lights up!