Fake Dog for Home Security

&gt; The dog has a lot of false positives from the cameras being triggered by car headlights or small animals.<p>My real dog has the same feature, so you’re at least doing a good job mimicking nature, heh.

When I bought a house I picked up a dog dish and put it by my walkout basement sliding door. Also the pond next to my house has old tennis balls show up in it now and then so I put them next to the dish.<p>According to the local cops break ins in my area are mostly just kids going into open garage &#x2F; garage side doors &#x2F; back doors that are left open and stuff to steal is out and obvious and so on.<p>I figure just the sense of hassle &#x2F; unknown of &quot;who knows how this dog is&quot; might be enough of a deterrent.

To add credence to this post, I once heard an interview with an incarcerated burglar who claimed that dogs where the one deterrent that scared him off. He said that an alarm as only as good as the response times of the police and he&#x27;s usually in and out of there in five minutes anyway. But who wants to risk it with a dog? Better to just move on to the next house.<p>A few more tips:<p>- Best place to hide valuables is in the kitchen pantry. Master bedroom is the most common place, but who is gonna think to go through your snack food.<p>- A lot of burglaries happen in the winter in the late afternoon or early evening when it is starting to get dark out, but before the homeowners get home from work.<p>- Your house is only as strong as the weakest link. Fancy locks can be bypassed by breaking a window. Design your security system to handle low level burglars (who probably don&#x27;t know how to pick a lock), not foreign spies. For most people, this also holds true for online security.

I saw a rather comical sign posted in the first-floor window of a Philadelphia apartment. It had a silhouette of a German shepherd and text beneath, which read:<p>&gt;I can get from the second-story floor to the front door in 1.2 seconds. Can you?

I get package thefts, people pissing on my entryway, and general creeping late night. Of course I have a doorbell cam but it doesn&#x27;t help. I&#x27;ve now set up a homekit automation which triggers via the doorbell&#x27;s motion sensor. It flicks the exterior and interior hall lights on via smart switch, one after the other with a slight random jitter, to create the illusion of someone about to come out the door.

Most family dogs will just roll over for belly rubs once the burglar is inside, but the barking is a great deterrent because it draws attention. The burglar has no idea if that is normal or not, and if someone else might hear it and come investigate.

It reminds me of a story that made the news[0] some years ago.<p>The local police received complaints that a dog was being mistreated, chained on the same spot for days.<p>Arriving at the scene they found out that an elderly couple were using a Rottweiler statue for keeping burglars away from their house.<p>OP&#x27;s fake dog is a great improvement over that one!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g1.globo.com&#x2F;mg&#x2F;sul-de-minas&#x2F;noticia&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;pm-e-acionada-apos-denuncia-de-maus-tratos-mas-encontra-cachorro-de-plastico-em-mg.ghtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g1.globo.com&#x2F;mg&#x2F;sul-de-minas&#x2F;noticia&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;pm-e...</a>

Reminds me of the late 70&#x27;s and early 80&#x27;s when car alarms were becoming popular. You could buy fake scary-looking &quot;Car alarm enabled&quot; stickers for your window at Radio Shack. You could also buy a little box that stuck to your dashboard that was nothing more than a blinking light, in order to reinforce the thought.<p>Back then it was not uncommon for car alarm installers to advertise their work on the driver&#x27;s side windows of the cars. &quot;Protected by Viper!&quot; Stuff like that.<p>I remember the first time I saw a car like that. It was in the parking lot of an amusement park. I threw a bunch of road trip crackers on the car, and let the seagulls have a party.<p>They didn&#x27;t seem to care about the computer voice: &quot;Warning! This car protected by Viper! Stand away from the car!&quot; -bloop!- -bloop!- -bloop!- -bloop!- -weee-awwww!- -weee-awwww!- -weee-awwww!- -booo-weeep!- -booo-weeep!- -booo-weeep!- -fweeeeeeeep!- -fweeeeeeeep!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- And so on.

How about barking and a door shaker mechanism to rattle the door as if the dog is throwing itself against the door in an effort to get to the intruder?

I met an older Australian woman that sailed around the world solo, and swore by the fake dog for scaring off opportunistic pirates. She didn’t carry a gun or other weapon. Just a cassette tape on repeat when anchored.

anecdotal story: my old rottweiler pepper once stopped a neighborhood kid from stealing a plasma cutter out of my garage. her pups had recently littered next to the lawnmower and she was sleeping under the table saw at the time. she had managed to chew him up badly enough to need an ambulance, and at the time it was a pretty horrifying experience for everyone involved, but eight years later his parents and I are pretty good friends. ive even driven him to a substance abuse program a few times.

Beards of similar length and greyness to mine might remember this was a project, probably from the brow of R. A Penfold posted in a monthly electronics magazine. Damnit, I can still recall a schematic: ORP12 and LED + lens broken beam detector, 555 timer as clock, 74590 binary counter, an EEPROM, 8 bit DAC and push-pull power amplifier based on TIP30&#x2F;31 transistors. IIRC the crazy part was you needed to build an EEPROM programmer as step one, and hand program the sound sample using a BBC micro parallel port. Digitised dog barks were available by floppy disk in the mail.

Unless you have a dog that&#x27;s trained to attack, generally they&#x27;re pretty docile with just a treat or two, might be good enough to stop opportunistic crimes though.

&quot;The dog has a lot of false positives&quot;<p>Wow, just like my real dog!

&gt;A Python script kept alive by Supervisor<p>I laughed a little. Sometimes the job needs to be done quickly and in a familiar way, I suppose.

Man, was really hoping it was this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;robot-dog-with-submachine-gun-is-dystopian-nightmare-fodder&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;robot-dog-with-submachine-gun-...</a>

I can attest to having a barking dog being an excellent deterrent. One night about a year ago, somebody was snooping around our backyard (we saw them on the security camera), one sharp bark (from the little dog no less, our bigger dog isn’t much of a barker) sent the snooper running.<p>I’ve long thought that this could &#x2F; should be a simple home security system. Glad to see somebody did it and that it worked for them!

This along with a fake TV lighting source on a timer will deter most people casing your house.<p>I got the fake TV lighting source generator on Amazon probably 15 years ago - really looks like someone is watching TV in the room.

We installed X-10 barking dog modules 20 years ago. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.powerhouse.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;home-security&#x2F;46-x10-dk10-barking-dog-alarm.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.powerhouse.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;home-security&#x2F;46-x10-dk10-barki...</a>

Here&#x27;s a video from a former burglar talking about break ins and I linked specifically to the section on dogs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;DtwD-c9hn58" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;DtwD-c9hn58</a>

“ The dog has a lot of false positives from the cameras being triggered by car headlights or small animals.”<p>That’s ok, the original version can also be triggered by small animals and cars.

If you want to make the sound more authentic, paws&#x2F;claws on the floor would do a lot. It makes it sound like the dog is present in the immediate environment.

I used to walk home from school past a neighbour who had a similar system.<p>The speakers were quite pathetic, so we figured out it was a recording pretty quickly. And so we took to running past the house again and again, triggering the barking noise to our delight.<p>A few weeks later, the system was removed.

This need to run on a back up power system in case they cut the power before enter

When I was a kid, we had one of these things and it was triggered by a motion sensor. But we _also_ had a large taxidermied dog sitting in the window. Used to really trip people out.

&gt; The dog has a lot of false positives from the cameras being triggered by car headlights or small animals.<p>To be fair, actual dogs have a lot of false positives too, so it&#x27;s not too dissimilar.

This is awesome. It will probably bark more than my actual dog haha

The extension kit include a fake dog door, dog bowl, chewed up bone, and fake dog poo (large).

Don&#x27;t get a greyhound. Odds are the burglar wouldn&#x27;t even know my dog was there.

I thought it was going to be like a physical one, but the sound makes sense.

Soon an add-on device for Alexa, Siri, Google home.<p>Actually I might buy one myself.

Would be great if this could be setup with Google home or Alexa!

v2. A running toy dog with speaker playing barking sound -- natural sound of steps plus a moving sound source

ahah oh my gosh I love this! Neat project, thanks for sharing!

If the OP was in Europe he could be sued by the trespasser due to the GDPR for posting the trespasser photo on a website without his consent.

Here&#x27;s a nasty story.<p>Small college town. Nice, lots of bookstores. Retired professors. Food co-op etc<p>Once excellent school, now on the skids. Student population in decline.<p>Local student-housing management companies, slumlords, etc, are alarmed. They&#x27;re losing money.<p>Solution. State-subsidized housing of low income families and ex-prisoners.<p>Nice college town now has riots and shootings every night. Burglaries of nice retired professors&#x27; homes skyrocket.<p>Town builds new triple-sized police station.

I can not stand thievery. And the brazen nature of it is so irksome. The fact that people need a fleet of security cameras and a fake dog to protect their home is ridiculous. These people should be caught and sent off to labor camps for a very, very long time.

Don&#x27;t get a fake dog for home security.<p>Get a real gun. Then go to a tactical trainer who has served in the military <i>ideally in a small arms instructor capacity</i> - they&#x27;re all over the nation - and inquire about home defense courses.<p>And don&#x27;t get a &quot;handgun&quot;, get an AR-15 &quot;pistol&quot;. That is, an AR-15 platform, a stabilizing brace, and a shortened barrel. If you&#x27;re unsure what all this means, don&#x27;t worry, your local firearms dealer will almost certainly know and understand if you come in and ask for those things. If a break-in occurs, you&#x27;ll be too nervous and too frightened to aim well with your standard 9mm handgun. An AR-15 with a stabilizing brace and a shortened barrel with a vertical forward grip is sturdy, you can brace it against your shoulder (obviously), and it has sufficient power to stop an intruder.<p>At the end of the day, <i>you</i> and <i>only you</i> are responsible for your own safety. Even if you live in a gated community, you cannot count on your local security or law enforcement to arrive quickly enough to save you. Remember the old adage. &quot;When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.&quot;