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How I taught my dog to text me selfies

twilio.com

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Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#41

Post by jedberg »

gregorymichael wrote: post #7
jkot wrote: post #6

Nice, I guess author does not have a kids yet. It is fun to teach 1 year old howto use phone. edit: author has a kid, congrats

If you look closely in the background of that video, you'll see a Mamaroo. She's only four months, so for the time being the dog is way more trainable. Curious, have you read anything / have any concerns about introducing your kids to screens that early? I'm so afraid I'm rewiring her brain too young when I see her staring at my phone.

I'm curious too as I also have a 4 month old and I can't find any well sourced studies with any solid conclusions.

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#42

Post by lawry »

broabprobe wrote: post #40

Cheap stylish wooden boxes for cheap is the biggest thing about this. Definitely will consider cigar boxes for my next project.

I've also had luck with 3.5" HD enclosures, they were as cheap as the drive without enclosure and with a bit creativity make for very nice looking enclosures for electronic projects.

Another pro-tip I picked up is using match-boxes for storing electronics (resistors, connectors, small modules). They are cheap and you can tape/glue them together to create arrays of small boxes. The sides are clear thus perfect to write what they contain.

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#43

Post by Theodores »

"How I taught my dog how to market twilio.com"

SMS is all very interesting but it is not 2013 any more so there is no need to send an SMS (paying people on the way) when you can just send an email. It still pops on the person's phone as a new message (at least in Android world, no idea how those iPhones work). Email also has better delivery, speaking as someone in a poor reception area I cannot reliably receive messages, however, wifi works pretty good at home and I can get emails with that whereas wifi does me no favours for SMS.

A few years ago I did have SMS for my own version of an uptime monitor, however, when my credits ran out I didn't miss the SMS messages at all (my script also emailed). That led to my 'discovery' that being able to send an SMS from a bit of code might be impressive however it is also not that useful in the first world. Maybe this product is better suited to dogs in the developing world somewhere.

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#44

Post by notatoad »

Theodores wrote: post #43

"How I taught my dog how to market twilio.com" SMS is all very interesting but it is not 2013 any more so there is no need to send an SMS (paying people on the way) when you can just send an email. It still pops on the person's phone as a new message (at least in Android world, no idea how those iPhones work). Email also has better delivery, speaking as someone in a poor reception area I cannot reliably receive messa…

Yeah, i love twilio, but its value is in integrating with legacy services or customers who are stuck on old technologies. Using it to build new services around SMS/MMS that don't need to be built on SMS seems a little backwards.

"so we take this awesome system, it takes pictures that we upload it to dropbox, a perfectly acceptable destination for pictures. and then, for some strange reason, instead of sending an email or just leaving it there in dropbox or doing any of the other great things we can do with pictures, we make an MMS"

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#45

Post by [deleted] »

sharkweek wrote: post #31

Used to train dogs at a local shelter in my free time. It was honestly one of the most fun parts of my week. We used clicker training, and it always impressed me how even the oldest of dogs could learn new tricks (har har) if you found what motivated it, and then incentivized a specific action based on that motivation. Even more fun was finding a really smart dog who you could teach to do the craziest stuff. Had one…

[deleted]

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#46

Post by mbrameld »

gregorymichael wrote: post #17
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

I have discovered that my labrador would kill himself trying to figure out how to solve differential equations if he knew he could get a bite of ginger bread for it :-). That said, having raised a puppy that was destined for guide dog training, the trick is early on getting the dog to understand that you are asking it to do stuff. That is a big part of puppy training, and once trained, the dog will look for you to as…

I feel like my dog has way more potential than I have the ability to unlock. Any resources you'd recommend on training?

Kikopup's YouTube channel has lots of good stuff about reward-based training too: https://www.youtube.com/user/kikopup

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#47

Post by lawry »

kirankoduru wrote: post #29

That program looks so simple. Never wrote a program for an Arduino before but I guess its time now.

Funny as it is, you'll be spending more time figuring which components to buy and which ones you actually need. And eventually figuring out how to build enclosures/boxes for you projects. Power supply also seems to be a difficult topic to get right if you're building wireless projects.

There are tons of examples, tutorials, libraries available for Arduino, and keep in mind once you're done with prototyping you can just buy the Atmega328P (5$) and if you add an ESP8266 (5$) to the mix you can make anything wireless.

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#48

Post by StavrosK »

sharkweek wrote: post #31

Used to train dogs at a local shelter in my free time. It was honestly one of the most fun parts of my week. We used clicker training, and it always impressed me how even the oldest of dogs could learn new tricks (har har) if you found what motivated it, and then incentivized a specific action based on that motivation. Even more fun was finding a really smart dog who you could teach to do the craziest stuff. Had one…

I did the same for mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COIVkkHxNR0 (this isn't the bang video, but she knows the commands for "what do you want?" "point" "go home", etc).

I also taught her verbs and nouns, and could say "point ball" and she would point to her ball, or "fetch ball" and she would fetch it. Same with "bone", "rope" and a few more toys.

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#49

Post by mekaj »

astazangasta wrote: post #39
scuba7183 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually not a bad idea. Set up a site and make it easy to donate $1 or some low amount

You guys should read about this artist's exhibit, where he has himself shot by a paintball gun hooked up to the Internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafaa_Bilal Don't do this to the poor dog.

Got me intrigued. Here's a link to Bilal's page on the project: http://wafaabilal.com/domestic-tension/

Re: How I taught my dog to text me selfies

#50

Post by hayksaakian »

notatoad wrote: post #44
Theodores wrote: post #43

"How I taught my dog how to market twilio.com" SMS is all very interesting but it is not 2013 any more so there is no need to send an SMS (paying people on the way) when you can just send an email. It still pops on the person's phone as a new message (at least in Android world, no idea how those iPhones work). Email also has better delivery, speaking as someone in a poor reception area I cannot reliably receive messa…

Yeah, i love twilio, but its value is in integrating with legacy services or customers who are stuck on old technologies. Using it to build new services around SMS/MMS that don't need to be built on SMS seems a little backwards. "so we take this awesome system, it takes pictures that we upload it to dropbox, a perfectly acceptable destination for pictures. and then, for some strange reason, instead of sending an emai…

Both of you missed something big about SMS/MMS:

It's not really a messaging system, it's a push notification system that everyone who has a smartphone is subscribed to.

You probably have a phone that can accept MMS, and a corresponding phone number.

Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.

Individual systems might be great at specific things (motion detection, security systems, etc.).

Dogs are living beings, they can be trained by average humans to do new things that your typical security system never imagined.

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