Fake Dog for Home Security

Fake dog barking for home security while on vacation.

I set up a fake dog that barks if my surveillance cameras are triggered while I'm out of town on vacation. It's a pair of computer speakers plugged into a Raspberry Pi, which is an inexpensive single-board computer. One speaker faces the front door and the other faces the side door.

When the front door camera is triggered my surveillance camera system sends a message to the Raspberry Pi. A simple program plays an audio clip of a big dog barking through the side speaker and then the front speaker. The change in speakers simulates a dog moving towards the front door. The opposite happens if the side door camera is triggered.

You can find the source code on my Gitea.

Technical Details

My surveillance cameras sit on a separate network without internet access and their RTSP streams are consumed by the Blue Iris NVR software running on a dedicated Windows box. When an object is detected moving through a defined area for certain cameras, Blue Iris is configured to send an MQTT message to the iot/cameras topic via the Mosquitto broker running on my media server.

iot/cameras