Over on the new Adafruit Playground, user cadet702 shows how to make large buttons which signal you if pushed. Folks are training their dogs to use the buttons to signal various desires.

This project was born from two desires. One, see if our dog could be taught to use buttons without spending piles of money. Two, to make use of an ancient Raspberry Pi.

Lots of people have done a project like this, and it isn’t necessary to use a Raspberry Pi. That just happened to be the only unused piece of electronics I had on hand with audio output. But, I will say that I definitely recommend this approach for a couple reasons. Firstly, it’s very easy to get running in Python with Adafruit’s Blinka library. Second, it leaves lots of room for growth (both in number of buttons and features like button presses sending digital messages).

Catch the entire how-to in the tutorial on Adafruit Playground.