{"id":1046,"date":"2013-09-04T08:38:56","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T15:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/?p=1046"},"modified":"2015-05-05T18:33:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T01:33:06","slug":"a-promise-that-in-the-future-it-will-be-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/2013\/09\/a-promise-that-in-the-future-it-will-be-better\/","title":{"rendered":"A promise that, in the future, it will be better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Elizabeth came on <a title=\"Facebook status: maybe not dead\" href=\"http:\/\/embedded.fm\/episodes\/2013\/9\/3\/17-facebook-status-maybe-not-dead\" target=\"_blank\">my podcast<\/a> to talk about Dolores, an older neighbor who lives alone. We got to talking about a device that would let Dolores maintain her independence while reassuring her family (and Elizabeth) that she is fine.<\/p>\n<p>The idea is similar to the <a title=\"Thinking of you jar\" href=\"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/2013\/08\/cute-internet-enabled-led\/\" target=\"_blank\">thinking-of-you jar<\/a> I&#8217;ve been working on to explore the Electric Imp. Essentially, add an accelerometer, put it all into something cute (i.e. a teddy bear), have Dolores pat it when she wakes up (or if it is in the kitchen, when she walks by). If Dolores doesn&#8217;t pat it by 10am or three times a day or (setting to be determined), it will contact her family who can call and checkup on her.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t a hard concept. And I&#8217;ve been scooped a bit by <a title=\"Goodnight Lamp\" href=\"http:\/\/goodnightlamp.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Goodnight Lamp<\/a>. (Hmph! People who take my ideas and go back in time to make them!) But their solution is pretty expensive (~$150) and I think I can do something for $80 from off the shelf parts.<\/p>\n<p>Parts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Electric Imp on Digikey\" href=\"http:\/\/www.digikey.com\/product-detail\/en\/IMP001-US-R-ENG\/1413-1003-ND\/3979638\" target=\"_blank\">Electric Imp<\/a>: $25<\/li>\n<li>Electric Imp\u00a0<a title=\"April breakout board\" href=\"http:\/\/www.digikey.com\/product-search\/en?FV=fff40036,fff802bc,fffc0585&amp;chp=0\" target=\"_blank\">breakout board<\/a>\u00a0(April): $10<\/li>\n<li>Tri or bicolor LED $2<\/li>\n<li>Battery solution: I think that something like\u00a0<a title=\"USB LiPo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sparkfun.com\/products\/10161\" target=\"_blank\">this\u00a0<\/a>will work so say $15 + $15 for the\u00a0<a title=\"2600 mAh battery\" href=\"http:\/\/www.adafruit.com\/products\/328\" target=\"_blank\">battery<\/a>. Wow, this ends up being significant!<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"USB Wall wart\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sparkfun.com\/products\/11456\" target=\"_blank\">USB wall wart<\/a>: $4<\/li>\n<li>Three axis a<a title=\"Accelerometer\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sparkfun.com\/products\/10955\" target=\"_blank\">ccelerometer<\/a>: $10<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the podcast, I said I thought it would cost around $80 to do a handcrafted one and my total here is $81. Yay estimating skills! Oh, I forgot:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Adorable receptacle: priceless.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the show we also talked about features:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Dolores would pat the bear.<\/li>\n<li>WiFi or other configuration to be set up by a daughter, Elizabeth, or other caregiver.<\/li>\n<li>Bear will also light when people hit a website (so the thinking of you functionality).<\/li>\n<li>System will message daughter (text, email, phone) if Dolores doesn&#8217;t pat the bear before certain times. (No check-in)<\/li>\n<li>System will also message daughter if bear is not charged or service is down for some reason.<\/li>\n<li>Daughter can see when the bear was patted (to verify system is working).<\/li>\n<li>Chargeable: 1 week of battery. Plugged in via USB wall wart.<\/li>\n<li>If battery is low (1\/3 usable charge remaining or 3 days), system will email Dolores.<\/li>\n<li>If the battery is very low (2 or 1 day of battery left), system will email daughter.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Some I added later:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The bear will respond to a pat with an LED light (white if tricolor, green if red-green).<\/li>\n<li>If the bear&#8217;s charge is low, it will respond to a pat with a blinking red light.<\/li>\n<li>If you keep patting, the bear&#8217;s LED turns yellow. After thirty seconds of intense &#8220;patting&#8221;, the bear turns red and messages the family.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>None of this is all that difficult. I looked at the Electric Imp hardware. I need to add battery monitoring so I&#8217;ll learn their Sampler class. And I need to add an I2C accelerometer but I already made an I2C LED work so I do not expect a problem. Much of this is server side, the agent software that I&#8217;ve been avoiding. I know in theory how to do it but I suspect the practice will be like hitting my head on a wall a few times.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the work will be electronics: the battery is usable from 2.8V to 4.2V, the ADC input to the Imp presumably can&#8217;t go above it&#8217;s operating voltage (3.3V) so either I need to sort out a level shift (resistor divider? but that is a waste of power!) or figure out where else I can monitor power (maybe going into the Imp, on the April board?).<\/p>\n<p>Also, I know an accelerometer is overkill, especially three axis ones; there are other motion sensors. On the other hand, I know how to use an accelerometer really well and I&#8217;ve got many lying around. Though I wonder&#8230; a temperature sensor would cost nothing but it takes longer to work and breaks my patting method.<\/p>\n<p>Also, since the unit is going to be sleeping most of the time (for power reasons), the pat needs to wake it up. The Electric Imp has six pins available. I&#8217;m using 2 for I2C to the accelerometer, 1 for monitoring battery voltage, and 3 for the tricolor LED. If I need the accelerometer to interrupt the processor, I&#8217;m going to need to go to a bicolor LED so the user will only see red, green, and yellow. I think that is ok. But it makes me wonder if the accel really is the way to go. I don&#8217;t think I want a simple push button switch (not cute). Well, I need to go look at force sensitive resistors and soft potentiometers. Though how those are going to wake up the processor, I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>Yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elizabeth came on my podcast to talk about Dolores, an older neighbor who lives alone. We got to talking about a device that would let Dolores maintain her independence while reassuring her family (and Elizabeth) that she is fine. The idea is similar to the thinking-of-you jar I&#8217;ve been working on to explore the Electric [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,43,5,13,34],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ayok","tag-entrepreneur","tag-gadgets","tag-plans","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1547,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/1547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}