AJ Huggable Husky

Most Entertaining Hack

What it does

When hugged, the Husky will post a happy update to it's facebook page. However, if you leave it alone for too long, it gets crotchety and will beg for acknowledgement.

How I built it

There's three main aspects to this system.

Hardware input: a bunch of push buttons have been soldered together into a coat for the dog, and wired into a breadboard. If any of these are pushed, they trigger one of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO input ports.
Communication: The Pi is read using the typical GPIO input format.
Software output: This was probably the most finicky of all the aspects. Posting to a Facebook page must occur through a public Facebook app using their Graph API. Creating an app requires, among other things, a privacy policy and a long-term access code, both of which are tricky to get. From there, the actual coding and posting is fairly straightforward.

Challenges I ran into

There were several challenges. First, a raspberry pi software update auto-disabled ssh, which left me with no way to get in under short notice and lack of hardware. That took a couple of hours to resolve. My original designs had to be completely reworked due to the total incompatability of my outputs 5V system with any 3.3V input, even when using a logic level shifter. The solder continuously came apart. Also, facebook requires you to create a privay policy for any public app, even if it's not intend for public availability. That was a pain.