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.

Re: My Favorite part

[InternetOfJim]

I understand the concerns. I've tried to disclose appropriately and focused on two things: 1. This is a legitimately new approach. Pretty much everyone I know in the IoT and connected device world is still building a backend infrastructure and coding their own APIs, even for pure analytics apps. 2. A detailed tutorial seemed appropriate so people can see some of the ins and outs of doing this, and to show that now non-experts can do this kind of thing as a weekend project. Obviously, this doesn't eliminate code or servers. But the big win is that I don't have to deal with any of that. It's like saying Rails wasn't a big deal because all the code is on the framework, or AWS isn't a big deal because there are still servers. So look, I'm not a PR flack or something, I've been working on wireless sensors professionally for over a decade and I'm just excited to see the work get a easier, because I've spent a lot of the past 6 years building out and maintaining a scaled sensor backend before. It sucked, and I don't want to do it again if I can avoid it!

disclaimer enough Re:Warning: Slashvertisement

[Fubari]

Cut the author some slack. The guy pointed out his connection to Keen IO & Electric Imp early in the writeup; that is disclaimer enough for me. It was a fun and interesting read and I appreciate the time he put into the writeup.

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.

If Electric Imp dies so do all "the cloud" goodies

[atrimtab]

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.