Andrews Family

Red really is a wonder dog. She can fetch the remote, the phone, or even a beer out of the fridge. But when Livy started eating table food, she wasn’t the only one. Livy liked dropping food on the floor for Red or even being so bold as to have Red eat it out of her hand. Jenny and I have always been strict about Red not getting table food, but once Livy gave her a taste she was hooked. Ever since we’ve had a problem with Red taking food off the table and the kitchen counters when we aren’t home. We’ve tried to be vigilant about not leaving things out, but inevitably we are in a hurry and something gets left out and Red can’t resist. She knows it is wrong and she is sorry as soon as we walk in the door, but she just can’t beat her addiction. I’ve been frustrated by figuring how to curb her behavior and have been trying to come up with ways to deter her. Others on the internet are just as frustrated and the best solution I could find online was to put things on the table that would fall and make noise like a can filled with rocks to scare her. From the evidence, it looked like Red was sly enough to not knock something like that off and that it probably wouldn’t scare her off anyway. So I started brainstorming my own solutions and expensive impractical solutions, such as an electric fence or a some type of rigged shock collar came to mind. Yeah, it sounds harsh, but I was at my wits end.

When I talked Jenny into letting me get a Nintendo Wii, I told her that half of it was to play games and the other half was to play with the technology in it. The remote for the Wii, called a Wiimote, is the main difference between it and other gaming systems and a large reason for its popularity. The Wiimote has an Infrared (IR) camera on the front, a 3-axis accelerometer, and connects wirelessly via Bluetooth. The Wii comes with a sensor bar which sits on top of your TV which is simply a bar with two IR LEDs, one on each side. When the Wiimote’s camera is pointed at the sensor bar it can see the IR LEDs and can tell where you are pointing it and move the cursor on the screen. The accelerometer is used to detect how you are moving it so when you are playing tennis you just swing the remote as if it were a racquet. All of this information is transmitted back to the Wii over Bluetooth. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Nintendo used an existing standard for Human Interface Devices for the Bluetooth connection. Computers with Bluetooth use the same standard and this means that the Wiimote can actually be connected to a PC. Nintendo does use a proprietary format for their data, but a good portion of the format has already been reverse-engineered and can be found on Wiili.org.  A friend of mine at work wrote a simple driver to be able to use the Wiimote in LabVIEW which can be found here. So this basically enables you to use the Wiimote as a wireless sensor.

In my case, I wanted to be able to detect when Red was getting up on the table and scold her in some way. Using the Wiimote on one end of the table and an IR light source on the other end, I could detect if anything blocked the line of sight. To create the IR light source I got a IR LED from Radioshack for $1.79 and taped it to a AA battery. In addition to that, just in case Red was really sneaking and got past the IR light beam, I used the Wiimote’s accelerometer to detect vibration as a backup. So then I wrote a little program in LabVIEW to read the data from the Wiimote and if an attempted theft was occurring it plays a sound file and logs the time. For Red, I recorded myself scolding her.

So this past Sunday I set Red up for failure. I cooked brunch before we left for Mass complete with bacon knowing that Red can’t resist bacon. Then we conveniently left some plates on table when we left, but not before we armed the new security system. But what fun would it be if we weren’t there to see Red when she got caught? So I set up the camcorder to get more evidence. I was pretty sure that she would do it right after we left the house and would go straight for where Livy ate and sure enough she did. See for yourself below. Now we’ll have to see what the long term effects are and how long it will take to completely break her table surfing behavior.