Man Discovers a Way to Train His Dog to Text Him Selfies

March 27, 2015

In this episode of “dogs doing amazing things,” Twilio employee Greg Baugues has found a way to teach his dog how to take selfies and send them to his phone.

The idea started when he found a way to get his dog Kaira to do things by pushing a button. Over time, he taught her how to turn on the light.

Then, Banugues wondered whether he could use his programming talents to get his dog to text him selfies. Because that’s what talented developers do, am I right?

Using a big red button, cigar box and the Arduino Yun, which according to the company is a “tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer,” Banugues was successful.

How it works

Baugues wrote:

“The wifi enabled Arduino Yun has two microprocessors: one does all the pin interaction you typically associate with an Arduino. The second runs a stripped down version of Linux called OpenWRT which can run programs in your favorite scripting language (Python comes pre-installed, but you could put Ruby or Node on there if you so please). This project has one program running on each processor. Together, they are less than 60 lines of code.”

If you want to attempt this yourself, the full lines of code are available on Twilio’s original post.

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