2019-05-24

Tipping the scales

I am getting really good at upgrading the scales to do WiFi now, and read cards. The card of choice is a Monzo card which works perfectly well as an ID for weighing yourself. Notably Amex have an ID of 00000000 which is useless.

Really neat PCB, locking molex connectors, cables, the lot. It is working well. Marsden kindly sent the service manual so I can set to "kg" and "st/lb" modes for those that like old-school weights.

The system has a QR code on the scales, which allows you to register any card against your email address. You then weigh yourself and tap the card on the scales to record the weight.

When you tap the card it beeps to confirm it is working, and keep beeping until a stable weight is recorded over WiFi to the server. Simple UI if ever I made one!

Sadly, I have fried a couple of boards whilst doing these upgrades, but Marsden do spare parts (not cheap) and whilst I have a few clues what I may have done, I am not 100% sure of how I killed them. I think, with care, and anti-static, and being neat (avoiding any shorts, or diodes backwards) I can do this reliably now. Obviously very unofficial so I cannot expect any help from Marsden. They do make very nice scales though.

The next challenge is to make the web site that holds the data have graphs and sharing options and so on. At present it is just a list of weights. But even that is working for relatives using this solution.

This is turning in to the new fat-shamers club or something, not sure.

But what was the first thing on the web site? after registering the domain? well, it was getting an excellent lawyer to put together the privacy policy for us and ensuring we are GDPR compliant.

You have to love any lawyer that covers standing on scales with your pet cat as part of the privacy policy. Thank you Neil.


6 comments:

  1. So are you going to be offering scale conversion as a service?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha, no idea, I could maybe. Not sure how that works with CE marking, and so on. Probably OK.

      Delete
  2. I'd rather like a website that done a good job of just recording my weight. There's too many that are about tracking fitness, which I don't really care about, however weight and some nice graphs would be ideal.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If not a scale conversion service, an "I ship you my board and you modify and ship back"? Might get around CE marking issues, if I choose to put the board in a scale that's up to me ;)

    Or even just your designs etc for people to shamelessly copy you? Hell I'd pay for it if you don't want it to be open source!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is all in git hub, with detailed instructions and pictures, PCB layout and code.
      https://github.com/revk/M-125W

      Delete

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