Anyone who has washed a muddy dog knows the real problem is not the mud on the dog. It is the shake that puts the mud on you. Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here tackled it the way he tackles everything: he built a machine. His new video shows a car-wash-style rig for dogs, with an arch of moving nozzles that scans along a platform and sprayers underneath for the parts a hose never reaches. It passed a million views within about a day of going up on 1 November.
How the dog wash works
The design starts as sketches of a nozzle arch that travels the length of the dog, plus a set of undercarriage sprayers. The arch rides on a wooden carriage pulled by drive belts, and an Arduino control box runs the scan. The build mixes resin-printed parts and bent conduit, and the carriage roller wheels ended up being machined on a CNC lathe that arrived partway through the project.
The first test did not go to plan
Eva, the dog the machine was built for, was frightened by the platform, so a second dog, Brie, took over testing. The first muddy wash exposed problems with water pressure, nozzle placement and gaps in the deck. A revised floor grate and replumbed nozzles went into a second test, and the video ends with his wife's verdict.
Key details
- Problem: wash a muddy dog without getting mud shaken over the people doing it
- Mechanics: nozzle arch on a belt-driven wooden carriage, undercarriage sprayers, floor grate
- Control: Arduino-based control box that drives the scanning motion
- Fabrication: resin-printed parts, bent conduit, CNC-lathe-machined roller wheels
- Iterations: second version with a new floor grate and replumbed nozzles after the first test
Our take
The part worth stealing is the motion pattern, not the water. A carriage that sweeps a sensor, a nozzle or a tool along a fixed path under microcontroller control is the same idea behind plotters, scanners and camera sliders, and it is one of the easiest motion systems to build with a belt, a stepper and an Arduino. The honest part of the video is just as useful: the machine worked, the dog did not want it, and the second round of fixes came from watching a real user.
Image credit: Stuff Made Here (YouTube), frame from the video thumbnail, cropped and resized. Build details from the video and a published chapter summary of it.
About the author: Aswinth Raj is an electronics engineer and the editor of CircuitDigest, where he has published more than 150 hands-on projects and tutorials across Arduino, PIC, ESP32, Raspberry Pi and EV battery systems. He selects the stories on this page for what engineers and makers can actually learn or build from. Connect on LinkedIn
Add a comment
No account needed. Your comment appears once a moderator has reviewed it.