Our dog’s nightlight

My dog is mostly blind. She’s never been fully diagnosed as “blind,” but she’s run into walls full speed and whined at the foot of a lamp enough times to make us think, her vision’s probably not 20/20.

Blindness makes finding her water bowl a bit tricky in the middle of the night. The bowl is right beside our bed, so whenever she clacks around looking for her bowl it wakes up Wiff, who then has to turn on her iPhone flashlight. And as soon as she does, Bails starts drinking. It’s all well and cute, except it’d be better if Wiff didn’t have to wake up in the first place.

I decided to make a motion-activated nightlight setup.

I bought the Eve Motion for the motion sensor. It’s small, battery operated, and easily connects to my Apple Home, a requirement for my setup.

I bought a cheap low level plug-in LED and used a smart plug I had laying around. You can use any light, but I wanted something with a slim form factor so it could fit behind the night-stand cart thing next to the bed.

Then I setup a Home automation so that, when the Even Motion sensor senses movement (Bailey approaching the water bowl area), it turns on the smart plug, which has the LED plugged into it. Once it stops detecting motion, it waits for one minute and then turns off the smart plug. Also, the automation itself only runs from 2 hours after sunset to 30 minutes before sunrise.

One week in and this thing has already saved Wiff several middle-of-the-night wakeups. Money well spent.