Putting A Ruff In RFID

Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Stephanie Silk

When one hears of the growing “do-it-yourself” (DIY) trend, it usually involves decorating a bathroom, growing a garden or building a scrapbook. But making an RFID access control system…for a pet? That's what DIY means to Mike Larsen of Oshkosh, Wis.

It all started when one of Larsen's two dogs, Meesko, was diagnosed with hip dysplasia. She had to be placed on a special diet — one that was different from Mazies' — his other dog. “Meesko needed a certain type of food and was already a bit overweight. She would eat her food and then Mazie's food,” Larsen says. He needed to find a way for her to access her bowl and eat her food — and only her food — in the correct amounts. But it wasn't a walk in the park. “With everything I tried to do, she still tried to eat the other dog's food,” he says.

Once Larsen realized this might be a challenge, he invested in a few ideas. First was diet control, which involved placing food out at certain times of the day, watching over his dogs and then taking the food away. But, considering Larsen's 40-minute commute to his software development job every day at Avastone Technologies LLC, his free time was lacking. “We always open-bowl fed my dogs, and when we tried not to do that for a while, she wasn't having it,” he says.

Looking to technology for a solution, he bought a proximity card access control kit, which can be bought pre-assembled or in kit form, proximity key fobs, an adapter, a project box, buzzers and a bracket that would be used to secure the box to the food bowl.

He programmed two RFID key fobs. The first one, which would go on Meesko's collar, would react with the kit on Mazie's bowl. The key fob around Mazie's neck would cause a reaction from Meesko's bowl if she tried to eat out of it. When one dog goes to the other dog's bowl, they are not granted “access,” causing an audible punishment — an annoying buzz.

At first, the sound scared off his dogs slightly, but Larsen says he used a Pavlovian trick to heighten their fear of the bowl. “When I first played the sound, I would scold them so they would associate that sound with them being bad,” he says. But Larsen understands his dogs might just be more obedient than others. “People tell me that that would never work for their dogs, and that makes sense. Some dogs will surpass any scary sound just to eat.”

He admits this was definitely an experiment — he wasn't expecting amazing results. But after the three-week process of researching, ordering parts, assembly and testing, he found himself with a working device. He only had one step left — share it with other pet owners.

Larsen documented his system and loaded it onto YouTube (viewable at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSJrjugfmHA). He also put instructions up on a Web site where users from all over the world post step-by-step instructions for just about everything. “I put it up for fun and for others in the same situation. The reaction I'm getting is really good,” he says.

So is Larsen starting a trend of pet access control? He thinks that it may already be an emerging market. People have responded to his online video and instructions with comments about their personal contraptions, and even Larsen says he has looked for GPS tracking devices on dog collars in the past. “Recently, I've been seeing more and more products like these,” he says. “I think within a few years, it will be commonplace to know where animals are at all times.”

Larsen has no plans to sell his product, but he does plan to improve it by making the antenna reader large enough to extend around the perimeter of the bowl — much larger than the 2-in. radius it covers now. He also wants this to instill inspiration in others. “I'd like to see more people get into DIY security, even though there is so much to it,” he says. But his invention has certainly exceeded his original main goal. “Meesko is losing weight and it's helping her hips.”

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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