Keep Track Of Your Weight While Sleeping

When the average person looks at a bed, they think about sleeping. Because that’s what beds are for. You cover them with soft, warm cloths and fluffy pillows and you sleep on them. [Peter] is not your average person. He’s a maker. And when he looks at a bed, he thinks about giving it the ability to track his weight.

The IKEA bed has four Chinese-made TS-606 load cells under each foot with custom aluminum enclosures. Each one goes to an HX711 analog-to-digital converter, which offers a 24 bit resolution. These feed an Arduino Nano which in turns connects to a Raspberry Pi via USB to UART bridge. Connecting to the Pi allows [Peter] to get the data onto his home network, where he plots the data to gnuplot.

This smart bed doesn’t just track [Peter’s] weight. It can also track the weight of other people in the house, including his pets. Be sure to check his GitHub for full source code.

7 thoughts on “Keep Track Of Your Weight While Sleeping

  1. I’ve read through the documentation and it’s an interesting concept.
    My complaint with that is 1) privacy. How do you track guests?
    When someone sits down on your bed that is a friend.

    Additionally, I would skip the continuous tracking and do it like every digital scale does it.
    As soon as it registers a weight difference, take a reading for approx. 10 – 15 seconds, wait for the weight to level out and then take the average of that weight.

    With that way you don’t have to poll in rapid succession AND you save on data entries and comparisons.
    You sit down, scale starts to weigh. Cat jumps on top of you, scale goes up and as soon as everything levels out, you take the reading. Take the sum and compare it against all possible combinations.
    GF + you
    GF + Cat
    GF alone
    GF + 2 Cats
    You + Cat
    You alone
    You + 2 Cats

    IF that weight does not match any combination, write an additional entry to show “invalid” data. I.E. a friend and you sitting down on the bed. This way you know when stuff is wrong and you can automatically discard that entry after a day or so.

    And Ooooobsiously you could add IOT stuff to it to message you on your phone when an invalid entry is found and you know your GF should be alone at home …. *rolleyes*, take a picture of your surveillance cameras and of course match it with the facial recognition of your door-bell that rang 20 minutes earlier …. ;-)

    1. How do you propose to detect the change if not for continuous tracking?-)

      Personally I think it’s a better idea to keep more data around (unless storage is an issue) and then post-process the desired values, than to throw away the data right in the data acquisition phase.

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