[bigchewy]

I built something similar for my girlfriend recently. When she's at work, she misses our dog so I built her a device that, when activated, dispenses a few treats, takes a video of Pickles enjoying the treats and sends it back to the sender. She can activate it by either sending an email or, better, picking up a picture frame that I customized. Inside the frame is a sensor that detects her touching the photo and that triggers the process, with the video ending up on her phone.

The main components are a Raspberry Pi to listen and control things plus an Amazon Dash button that I reconfigured as an on/off switch located next to my front door.

Overall, the software itself was relatively easy. The tricky part was building a machine that dispenses a few treats consistently, not 3 treats then 15 then 0.

I've been thinking of writing this up in more detail. If there is interest, that may provide the motivation.

[ohhoe]

I definitely hope to incorporate a camera as one of the future releases. :D I want to be able to spy on my kitties while I'm away.

[bigchewy]

I tried an Arduino based one and the Raspberry PiCam. PiCam was far better quality. The challenge is getting it to stream real time which typically requires a hardcoded IP address. Easy if you have a router, hard if you live in an apartment complex.

The s/w for both can be largely cut/paste from the templates.

Of course you could also just buy a dropcam or similar device, which streams video to a site and then the mobile app watchest that stream, with a ~3 second delay. But that's not really fun

[HaseebR7]

Have you tried one of those Dynamic DNS services ?

[bigchewy]

not yet. I did some basic research but haven't gotten to it yet. I"m wondering if that is how the commercial IoT devices do it.