I have tried a commercial dog bark trainer, and the dogs respond appropriately, but the commercial unit has two serious drawbacks: 1) it’s battery operated (no wall power nearby) and goes through a set of 6 AAs in about a week, and 2) while it has a wireless remote activator, the range is too short to activate from inside our house, where we are when the dogs need a reminder to not bark endlessly.
So, this project is using a Particle Argon for its WiFi connectivity, I have pretty good WiFi coverage in the (2 acre) yard, so if I can connect to WiFi directly, that will be ideal. If not, I may be looking at a bluetooth mesh network with a repeater node or two. The thinking is to implement the remote activator via an http interface accessed from a smartphone, or any node on the home network really, but the phones are usually readily at hand.
The other aspect that drove me away from maybe using a Raspberry Pi Zero W or similar was the lower power demand of the Argon. I have allocated 10W of solar cells to charge a 3.7V 6600mAh battery pack. Hopefully that will be enough to get through most cloudy days and longer winter nights, while still having enough oomph to drive a pair of ultrasonic emitters with a MAX98306 3.7W Class D Audio Amplifier when needed.
That’s a great idea! I have used a few commercial bark trainers in the past and was unhappy with the results (my dog even thought the beeping was fun on one and barked more). I’d love to hear how this goes, please update on the build along the way.
The housing is starting to take shape. Solar cells on one side of the roof (facing South), and a lid to keep the bigger fauna out of the wiring on the north face.
That’s really coming together! But this post is missing some Pet Tax! How will we know if this is a good project if we don’t see a picture of the dog it’s built for?
The neighbor is a Corgi breeder, and the poor dears have to be let outside several times a day - sometimes for an hour or more while she’s out running errands… This is just a couple of the 8 or so she usually has:
The driver is mostly the MAX98306 3.7W Class D Audio Amplifier (as sold on a little support board by Adafruit), but since the emitters are mostly capacitive load I think I’ll be putting a little resistance in line (maybe 1 or 2 ohms) to help the amplifier work better, will experiment with some 8KHz output and see how it sounds. The emitters are these:
or these:
probably both, but parallel or series is another test with the 8KHz or maybe 12KHz signal to see how they sound. The stock numbers on those two parts are different but the parts themselves look identical.
