Slashdot Mirror
Ellipto: a DIY Fitness Tracker and Dashboard In 70 Lines
New submitter InternetOfJim writes: "This is one of the most fun weekend projects I've done in a while — a fitness tracker for my elliptical trainer. But the real agenda was to figure out how lazy I could be via web services (Keen IO and Brace IO) and development platforms (Electric Imp). Quite lazy, as it turns out. I wound up with a working device and a nice realtime dashboard with no soldering, no backend to manage, and surprisingly little original code needed beyond the sensing and power conserving parts of the firmware and a little javascript to customize the dashboard."
What's up with all the glorified pedometers these days? When I read 'fitness tracker' I was thinking about something that tracks your fitness, not just your steps. He could also install any of the thousands of pedometer apps on his android phone and be done with it.
Stop. InternetOfJim, it's good that you came clean on the fact that this is your wife's company, but you really needed a bold "disclaimer" in both the summary and article for me to think this is anything but a self-serving post to advertise something that will profit your wife and, by obvious extension, you. The fact that this is your first /. submission only supports this.
you ignore the massive libraries it uses.
I can write anything you want in a single line of code, given enough time to make a library that encapsulates all the required functionality into single function call.
Its not impressive, it just shows how you think you're impressive for using so much of someone else's hard work and acting like you did it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
can we build connected devices with no backend whatsoever. Yup, not even a single rented server, just these two services and a web hosting service.
No backend whatsoever. Except for the three backend servers, there's no backend server!
r.e. self serving: sure, but it also serves others (like myself) by being educational. I hope Keen IO makes a ton of money and goes on to create more cool things.
...but you really needed a bold "disclaimer" in both the summary and article for me to think this is anything but a self-serving post to advertise something that will profit your wife and, by obvious extension, you.
I mentally shut this out when I realized debounce() and tilted() were sharing a global variable called "ignore". Yeah, let's see what happens when feature creep sends this beyond 70 lines.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I checked into Keen Io and saw this bit about Pebble watches:
"Pebble needs to understand how users are interacting with the Pebble watch itself, including how often customers use the product, what theyÃ(TM)re using it for, and to what extent theyÃ(TM)re integrating the watch into their daily activities."
And then it goes on to all the stuff they are keeping track of. I get what they are trying to do, but is there an opt-out? Does the person buying the watch know they are being monitored? Everyone complains when mega-corp XYZ is doing big data tracking, but because the Keen IO/Pebble folks are nifty cool hipsters does that give their companies a pass?
Filled with nonsense like "Yup, not even a single rented server, just these two services and a web hosting service" Does he know what a web hosting service is? Does he think it's a sandwich or something?
And "power consumption down to 5mA". WTF? Low power is uA, not mA.
This is actually a nice little project. It is what many projects out there should be if they want to be useful to normal people. It has a fairly simple hardware component and a fairly simple software component and a fairly decent reason for being created. My kids could take this as a starting point and within a few days have something physical that they have created and be able to modify it from there to do something useful or educational or both. These are the sorts of projects that should be done in school to show non-geeks they they can make things too.
Is this a slashdot-worthy article? I think it probably belongs on hack-a-day or something like that rather than slashdot, but I don't really care. If you care then you should complain to the moderators about their submission standards and stop beating up on someone who actually did something rather than just whine about how much of an unloved genius they are.
Electric Imp would be interesting if open source. Alas, it's not. It's proprietary and everything is in "the cloud," so if the company dies so do all the projects and products that work with it as you lose access to the Imps that are deployed.
What I find amazing is that product's like Lockitron are totally dependent on this may not be there tomorrow proprietary cloud platform.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!