Bark Back at Your Dog with This Raspberry Pi Setup

When your dog barks at the mail carrier or other passersby during the day, you can shush him as needed, but what about when your not around? As seen here, if you’re Jennifer “jenfoxbot” Fox you just use your Raspberry Pi assistant to take care of this for you!

Her system uses a SparkFun MEMS microphone breakout board to send an intensity signal to the Pi via an analog-to-digital converter chip for sound measurement. The Pi then compares this data to the threshold is has setup, and if doggo’s (or whatever animal you prefer to keep in your house) noise exceeds this, it emits an audio response. OMXPlayer, which is pre-loaded with the Raspbian OS, is used for audio feedback which could include actual songs, or perhaps more likely, responses like “be quiet,” or something more sarcastic and subtly shaming like “bark, bark, bark, bark.”

In addition to this instantaneous feedback, the system is also setup to pass data to the cloud over MQTT. You can then monitor your pup remotely, and see if he’s being a good boy, or perhaps note that something might actually be amiss if the barking is sustained for long enough. This setup could certainly be expanded with a camera or other sensors for more feedback, but for now be sure to check out jenfoxbot’s demonstration of this setup with her dog Marley in the video seen here.