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."

Comments

Warning: Slashvertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

New submitter InternetOfJim writes:

So, the other day, my lovely wife Caroline came home with an Imp. An Electric Imp, to be precise—a WiFi sensor/actuator node in the form factor of an SD card. It’s supposed to be designed for simple development and low power consumption. Electric Imp had just completed an integration with Keen IO (Caroline’s company). Keen IO is a powerful platform for backend analytics— you just send them the data and you can build beautiful dashboards by inserting simple javascript onto an HTML page.

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.

Re:Warning: Slashvertisement

[TheCarp]

If it was strictly an opinion piece or even a simple review, I might agree. If this was aimed at a comparison between products, absolutely. However, looking over this there is quite a bit of content, with code. Its basically a tutorial on setting up the device.

Why does someone who is basically a tutorial author need to disclose his relationship to the company?

Disclosures are to call out the appearance of conflict of interest. I see no clonflict here, in fact, whether the author was paid outright to write the piece or not seems irrelevant for the type of content. I mean lets go one step further and assume its not his wife but him, lets make him an officer of the company even. Where is the conflict in him givning examples of how to use his product on a technical level? If Jeff Bezos wrote an article on how to setup your amazon merchant account, nobody would bat an eyelash.

In short, disclaimers are for professionals who need to maintain a reputation for impartiality, not for people doing demos.

70 lines of code ... IF

[BitZtream]

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.