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Every pet owner knows that it is impossible to predict what toys your fur baby will love and what toys they’ll hate. Cat owners (servants?) know the feeling of buying an expensive toy just for Mittens to prefer the box it came in. My Australian Shepherd will either destroy his new toy immediately or baby it for years — nothing in between. Slee’s Yorkie was no different, so he decided to bring Tico’s favorite toy to life by turning it into a robot.

Tico is getting up there in years and needs exercise to stay in shape. To try to keep the pup active, Slee tried buying interactive toys for Tico. You may have seen these kinds of dog toys before. Most of them resemble squirrel tails or blinky balls and contain motors, so they can zip around on the floor. This is supposed to activate the canine’s prey drive and entice them into giving chase, so they get some movement. Unfortunately, Tico wasn’t having it. He didn’t like those toys and mostly just barked at them in anger. But Tico has a favorite toy called Toshi that Slee was able to motorize, giving the dog the motivation he needs to stay fit.

Slee was able to give Toshi the robotic treatment with just a few off-the-shelf components. Those included an ESP32 development board and a pair of continuous rotation servo motors. Because they’re low-power servos, Slee could control them directly from the development board instead of using driver boards. Toshi is just a squishy rubber frog thing, so Slee simply hot-glued it onto the same breadboard that holds the ESP32 development board. To test it out, he programmed it to drive forward indefinitely. Tico loved it and had a blast chasing the toy as it zoomed across the floor.

Now Slee just needs to make the robot more durable so it can hold up to Tico’s abuse. Slee can also program more complicated movements to keep Tico on his toes.

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