June 2016
I have a very attentive dog who barks immediately when someone is in the backyard or at the front door. This is great for alerting me to visitors or possible intruders, but I really can’t hear as well as I used to and my dog has a rather quiet and high-pitched bark that I mostly can’t hear — especially if the TV is loud. I would like plans or a design for a “dog bark detector” to blink a light by my chair when the dog is barking so I don’t miss these “alerts.” Does anyone have a circuit or schematic for such a thing?
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You don't need to build hardware. You already have all the “hardware” you need. You need to do some programming; namely, programming (teaching) your dog to push on your hand when there is an intruder. Such a trained dog is known as a service hearing dog or signal dog. Find a skilled trainer to teach your dog to alert you by physically pushing on your hand or if your dog is tiny to whack your ankle.
A trained dog is infinitely more useful than any circuit you can build, e.g., when trained to do so the dog will wake you up when the alarm clock goes off, keep you from being run over by cars and bicycles, tell you when people are sneaking up behind you or are at the front door. A dog will alert you to anything you teach her. The idea here as in most engineering problems is to solve the problem at hand in the simplest way rather than forcing a preconceived and quite possibly inferior notion to do what you want.
