Puppies and technology

Brandie Heinel — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:53:00 -0400

8 months ago I adopted a puppy and named her Frog. I also crate trained her, but now my little puppy has grown into a larger puppy. This means that it’s time to experiment with leaving her out of her crate and allowing her to take advantage of the entire house. Since my puppy would be at home alone with access to things like my large shoe collection, the couch, a stupidly over priced coffee table, chairs, and shelves of books, I decided to set up a webcam to spy on her.

The first experiment didn’t go so well. I didn’t have any sound, and I only had one view of where I thought she would hang out (by the front door, of course). Both of these were huge issues since I wanted to know if she was barking or possibly eating my couch. Also, since I would be out and about while she was home alone I wanted to be able to see her on my iPhone. This lead to experiment number two.

For experiment number two I hooked up an additional camera. The first camera faced one side of the house while the other would face the opposite direction. This time, though, I set up some special features. First I changed from still images to full motion MPEG 4 video (so it would play on an iPhone) triggered by motion sensors on the webcam inputs. Whenever she would walk or move within these special zones, I would record a 30 second video and upload it to a web server. This of course meant that I now had sound as well, and I soon found out that our puppy has a lovely singing voice (see figure A below).

For the first few days I was worried that she would annoy the neighbors with her singing, and I even had a close call when I forgot to disable the Roomba one day (see figure B below). But during my fourth experiment my little Frogger finally stopped singing and went to sleep. Hooray!

If you are interested in setting up your own puppy cam, it’s actually very simple. I have all Apple computers at home, so I installed some software called Evocam. The software takes care of all of the hard parts, like recording the video and even lets you select the transcoding options (it uses Quicktime). It’s really easy. I wish it took more and that I could say it took all this awesome work to set up but luckily the folks that made Evocam did all the hard work for me.

Figure A:

Figure B:

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Puppies and technology