Do you know a good dog in need of treats? This clever Raspberry Pi project from Milunova will make sure they’re consistently compensated for things outside of their control. Every time Milunova gets a follower on Instagram, a Pi dispenses a treat for their foster puppy.
The idea was to create a web scraper with the Pi to monitor Instagram for new followers. The best Raspberry Pi projects are ones with rewards, and this one gives a tasty treat any time the follower count changes on Instagram. According to Milunova, at the moment, users can follow and unfollow repeatedly to give endless treats to the dog but that isn’t the long-term plan.
To make sure the pup knows it’s time for a tasty snack, Milunova connected a Bluetooth speaker to sound a special alert. After the alarm is sounded, a motor, connected to the Raspberry Pi via an L298D controller rotates a 3D-printed treat tumbler to spill the good stuff.
We asked Milunova for a few more details on the software side and it looks like the Pi relies on Python alongside Beautiful Soup—a Python package designed for parsing HTML data. The script checks Instagram for the follower count while a loop verifies whether or not the follower count has changed. If it has, the puppy gets a sweet surprise!
If you want to take a closer look and see the treat dispenser in action, check out the original thread at Reddit and don’t forget to follow Milunova on Instagram!
