Woofer Onesie is a project that reads the pulse of a puppy with a heart-beat sensor, and displays it across the body, so you know exactly how your pooch is doing.


How it works

What do we have here?

Woofer Onesie is a wearable-tech accessory that is placed on the underside of a onesie and using the Adafruit Flora, connected with the Pulse Amped Sensor and a 60-LED neopixel strip, displays the puppy's heartbeat across its body.

What does it use?

  • Pulse Amped Sensor (currently soldered to the Adafruit Flora) + Adafruit Flora
  • A comfy cotton onesie
  • A 2xAAA Battery Cage with JST Connector
  • Felt for attaching the device to the onesie
  • An understanding puppy (not shown here)
  • An inactive Guinea Pig (also not shown here)

The Amazing Flora

Adafruit's Flora is an Arduino-compatible microcontroller used for wearable devices, and has built-in USB support to be reprogrammed according to the requirement.
For the purpose of Woofer Onesie, I soldered the Pulse Amped's as well as the Neopixel strip's connectors to the Flora's ports for easy placement.

The heart of Woofer Onesie

Woofer Onesie's functionality comes from the detachable felt device that comprises the Flora + Pulse Amped + Battery cage - all kept together with conductive thread and the support from a glue gun.


Testing on Matisse, the Puppy.

Hello Matisse.

This is Matisse. Taken after the iconic artist - he wanted to make his own mark in the world. And here he found his big break - by becoming the first puppy to have his heart-beat displayed on his body-sleeve.

Matisse with the Onesie.

The device was attached to the bottom of the Onesie with the pulse-sensor tucked tight on the underside (with the help of some elastic) to read his femoral artery and accordingly have a strip of lights run across the neopixel strip.

An excited Matisse.

Like all models on their first shoot, here we have Matisse really working his outfit and its services.

A tired Matisse.

However, after an exhausting day consisting of extensive documentation and multiple tailor-breaks, we have Matisse lying about the house - with just enough energy to observe passer-bys, and somewhat fulfill his original duties of a guard-puppy.


Testing on Mario, the Guinea Pig.

Testing the Onesie's services on Mario.

Here, the functionality of Woofer Onesie's sensor with neopixel will be tested on Mario with the heart-beat displayed around the periphery of his bed.

The different moods of Mario.

The first part of the video shows Mario comfortably sitting in his bed and the slow heartbeat shows how calm his body is.
In the second video, we can hear Matisse in the background wanting to play. Consequently, Mario's heart is racing because of the loud barking.
Mario was heavily comforted after the video was taken.

Voila!

And here we have it! A fully functional device that can measure one's heartbeat and display it on neopixels.

The code used to showcase the heartbeat on Mario and Matisse varies in purely the movement of lights. I wanted there to be a difference because Matisse's BPM is significantly lower than Mario's.