Teaching your dog to send selfies with an Arduino Yún

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One Maker used the combination of an Arduino Yún, Twilio and a big red button to train his puppy to send selfies. 

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Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen Makers use the combination of Twilio and Arduino to create a bunch of unexpected yet innovative things. Most recently, Greg Baugues paired the powers of this tandem with man’s best friend by training his new pup to take a selfie.

After teaching his dog to turn on a light by pressing buttons, Baugues began wondering if he could use the same mechanisms to teach Kaira to also send selfies. Well, evidently you can using an Arduino Yún (ATmega32U4) and a big red button. This was accomplished by housing the Arduino board inside an empty cigar box along with a massive arcade LED button from Adafruit. Meanwhile, a second box was employed as a stand for a webcam that was connected to the Yún.

“The Wi-Fi enabled Arduino Yún 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),” Baugues writes. “This project has one program running on each processor. Together, they are less than 60 lines of code.”

The Arduino sketch simply waits for the button to be pressed, runs a shell command to snap a picture and then executes a Python script to upload the picture to Dropbox and send the MMS. The Python script uses the Dropbox SDK and Twilio helper library to upload the picture to Dropbox, get a publicly accessible url for the picture, and use that URL to send an MMS via Twilio. Each of those codes can be found here.

“What’s most exciting to me about this project, aside from the sheer novelty of my dog sending selfies, is how simple each component is. The button press is literally the second example from Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino. The Python script is practically cut-and-paste from the Dropbox and Twilio getting started guides,” he concludes.

Intrigued? You can find a detailed breakdown of the project here.