Turning a Wii Balance Board into a net-enabled bathroom scale

http://www.stavros.io/posts/your-weight-online/?

by stavros • 13 years ago

74 21 13 years ago

johnpmayer• 13 years ago

What's so striking to me is that the barriers to prototyping these peripherals for general purpose use has been lowered significantly. It was not long ago where it took days of hacking to connect a Wiimote to your PC, and even then you probably wouldn't get full functionality.

Good work and thanks for sharing!

(also, obligatory "now the NSA can estimate if they can chase you on foot")

StavrosK5• 13 years ago

They'll never catch me! Muhahaha!

Seriously, though, that's because many people have put many hours of work into reverse-engineering protocols and writing libraries, which is fantastic.

This wouldn't be a two-hour job if so many people hadn't open-sourced their work.

bound008• 13 years ago

Any trained operative can size up someone they are chasing with daily weight data

Also, just ordered a third party version for $16.47 with amazon prime: http://pys.me/Trc It says that it is compatible with wii fit so I am hoping it uses the same protocol.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

This is a great example of innovation at work. And I really like the fact that he removed several dependencies from the existing solutions. You have to love that :)

StavrosK5• 13 years ago

Yeah, I think they were a bit unnecessary. The original author was using pygame for event notification (a queue would probably be enough) and a thread to receive the events. I just switched it to call methods on a different class, hopefully it will be more useful to people now!

smokey_the_bear2• 13 years ago

This is neat.

Sort of relatedly, I bought the Withings Wifi scale about a year ago, which does the same thing. I really like it. It is easy to go back and look at weight trends without having to obsess too much about the number each day.

stavros• 13 years ago

Yeah, exactly. My normal scale was missing the big picture of how my weight fluctuates month-to-month. I do need to implement some smoothing, though, as the raw daily value isn't as useful.

billrobertson422• 13 years ago

Daily weigh-ins can be very consistent if you weigh yourself in the morning at about the same time after using the toilet, and before eating/drinking anything.

smokey_the_bear2• 13 years ago

The withings web app has something built in to automatically pipe the data to LoseIt.com, there are several other options as well. I do that because I prefer the interface on LoseIt. You could probably also implement the api for one of those sites if you didn't want to handroll the whole thing.

jdalgetty• 13 years ago

We've been rocking the withings scale since January 2012 and it's made a world of difference for my wife and I.

EricaJoy• 13 years ago

Being able to track progress at a glance was a game changer for me.

anjc• 13 years ago

Excellent work. How accurate is the weighing with the averaging that you seem to be doing?

StavrosK5• 13 years ago

I'm only doing histogramming, so, as long as you don't move a lot, it's pretty accurate. The most frequent value will have 100 samples logged and the second most frequent will have 20, so that's quite the difference. I will compare it to my normal scale when I get back home, but it seems to consistently have a +1kg from that one (a Tanita something).

smtddr• 13 years ago

Sort of related, the newer WiiFit U coming out Nov 1st will have social features while trying to lose weight with others online http://wiifitu.nintendo.com/

I'm just posting it here because I really[1] like WiiFit and I hope others give it a try, you can truly get a workout from it and lose weight. I hope to make a cool promo vid or something about WiiFit U.

1. http://blog.sanriotown.com/minusworld:hellokitty.com/2011/06...

Turning a Wii Balance Board into a net-enabled bathroom scale

Related Stories