PI ZERO

Projects
A beacon is attached
to a collar and placed
around Bean’s neck
SHOWCASE
MATT REED
Matt Reed lives in Nashville,
Tennessee and is a creative
technologist at Redpepper.
mcreed.com
Bean is a greyhound that
lives with the Redpepper
marketing agency in
Nashville, Tennessee
Raspberry Pi devices are
placed around the office,
and the distance between
each one and Bean is
used to locate her
Quick
Facts
> The battery in
a beacon can
work for up to
a year
> Each beacon
has a unique
ID number
> The signal
strength is
used to detect
Bean’s distance
> It uses
trilateration, not
triangulation, to
detect Bean
> Sniffur can
detect Bean
in a 50-metre
range area
SNIFFUR
Matt always knows where Bean the dog is, thanks to his
beacon-powered Sniffur system – by Lucy Hattersley
W
e love animals here at
The MagPi, so when we
heard about a Raspberry
Pi dog-tracker called ‘Sniffur’,
we had to learn more.
Sniffur uses tracking technology
called ‘beacons’; these are
relatively new devices being placed
in department stores to track the
precise location of customers.
Sniffur flips this idea on its
head, by putting the beacon on
a moving object and using three
Raspberry Pis to detect where it
is. The object in question is Bean,
an adorable greyhound adopted by
Redpepper, a marketing agency in
Nashville, Tennessee.
“We’re a culture-first company,”
says Matt Reed, the project’s
maker. “A lot of us have dogs or
pets in some form, so part of us
being happy is knowing our pets
are happy. It doesn’t hurt that our
CEO also has two dogs.
“Bean is absolutely the sweetest
dog. Very shy, timid, loving. She
wanders around into people’s
offices and just stands next to their
desks waiting for rubs, then just
wanders on to the next spot.”
But all dogs like to go out and
play. “When [greyhounds] do,
they are very hard to catch because
they are so fast,” Matt tells us.
“They are the second-fastest land
animal after the cheetah: top
speed 43mph. Greyhounds also
have a high prey drive; if they see
a squirrel then it’s ‘bye bye’.
“The need to know where
she is at any moment and
see if she’s close to the front
doors is the reason Sniffur was
built,” continues Matt. “We
have done retail experiments
using Estimotes (estimote.com)
and constantly keep a stock
of beacons available in our lab
for experimentation.
“I grabbed one of the Estimote
beacons from the lab and ziptied
it to Bean’s collar. Usually,
beacons are attached in stationary
38 February 2016
raspberrypi.org/magpi