AnimHome - Connect Pet Equipments to Smart Home and Smart Phone

Your pet is one of the most present and active occupant of your home. That’s why high tech equipments for pets is such a demanding and growing market. Leveraging the amazing functions of these devices, by connecting them to the rest of the world, will allow the AnimHome project to provide extended services to you and your pet.

Step 1: Hack the Hardware

We start by taking the control of two standard pet equipments:

- the bowl, in order to get the weight variation while the pet is eating

- the food dispenser to trigger the motor remotely and provide one food portion

Step 2: Use Intel Galileo As Local Hub to Integrate Pet Equipments

We use Intel Galileo as a hub:

- to connect the equipments extended with arduino + specific sensors and actuators

- to act as a centralized gateway to the internet (and in the future to the smart home ecosystem)

- collect information from standard sensors: presence of the pet near the equipment,

- to collect the variation of weight of the food or water in the bowl

- to trigger the delivery of one food portion by the dispenser

Step 3: Write the Web Services and Mobile App

We wrote the apps:

- web services (currently hosted on the Google Cloud Platform) to manage the data contexts and the events processing

- mobile app to provide the pet equipments dashboard to the users

Step 4: Test and Approval by Real Users!

Thanks to dynamic pets and enthusiastic pet owners, different use cases have been tested including the use of the feeding data history by the vets.