Raspberry Pi dog detector (and dopamine booster)
You can always rely on Ryder’s YouTube channel to be full of weird and wonderful makes. This latest offering aims to boost dopamine levels with dog spotting. Looking at dogs makes you happier, right? But you can’t spend all day looking out of the window waiting for a dog to pass, right? Well, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module and machine learning can do the dog spotting for you.
What’s the setup?
Ryder’s Raspberry Pi and camera sit on a tripod pointing out of a window looking over a street. Live video of the street is taken by the camera and fed through a machine learning model. Ryder chose the YOLO v3 object detection model, which can already recognise around 80 different things — from dogs to humans, and even umbrellas.

Doggo passing announcements
But how would Ryder know that his Raspberry Pi had detected a dog? They’re so sneaky — they work in silence. A megaphone and some text-to-speech software make sure that Ryder is alerted in time to run to the window and see the passing dog. The megaphone announces: “Attention! There is a cute dog outside.”

“Hey! Cute dog!”
Ryder wanted to share the love and show his appreciation to the owners of cute dogs, so he added a feature for when he is out of the house. With the megaphone poking out of a window, the Raspberry Pi does its dog-detecting as usual, but instead of alerting Ryder, it announces: “I like your dog” when a canine is walked past.

Also, we’d like to learn more about this ‘Heather’ who apparently once scaled a six-foot fence to pet a dog and for whom Ryder built this. Ryder, spill the story in the comments!
12 comments
Niels
“When has a megaphone ever NOT made a project better?”. This project is so funny, I need more distraction like this!
crumble
I guess that the neighbors think different about this. We may never know, if the fork&torch-detector worked as well.
Sofyan Ardianto
dogs are awesome.. nice project!
Simon
I am Gonna Make myself one of these
JDG
Why not get just a dog? They’ll let you know quite loudly whether there are passing dogs, persons, birds, lambs, stoats, orangutans, breakfast cereals, lima bean-
heh
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
IKR 🙄
Mr. Foonty
For those who already have a dog (or dogs), adjust the camera to detect squirrels. Also, set the megaphone to yell “SQUIRREL!!!”
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
The humans squirrel watch in our house. You know a squirrel is running along a fence when someone shouts “Bob” or “Linda”. We named the squirrels after Bob’s Burgers characters because of course we did.
CLAUDE PAGEAU
It would be nice if there was a reference to the code rather than just a video. I actually found this python dog detection project on Github https://github.com/gordonCharles/DogDetect . For a Maker it is a lot more useful than just a video with no code references or how to’s.
CLAUDE PAGEAU
After doing some further checking found this reference to the Docker Install. https://github.com/rydercalmdown/dog_detector
Nick
Fun project. It can definitely be expanded to include a few more things :)
Yaron Kaplan
Not creepy at all!
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