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Just as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators
by Udo 11y ago
Just as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators with it, one is acting as a network-controlled media player, I even made one that acts as a faux remote control for the AC with IR diodes attached to the GPIO ports.
By contrast, I have several Arduino boards sitting here, and never found a good use for them. For me the appeal of the Pi lies in the combination of low energy usage, low price, networking, and comparatively high computing power. Once you get over the "woah, wasting an entire computer just for [insert menial task]" barrier, it's simply incredible what this single component enables you to cook up on a whim. The Pi allows me to make things that are not yet (or will never be) available commercially.
However, I would not say this thing is necessarily useful for all hackers or nerds. It's only useful if you have ideas for small, self-built devices that require programmable intelligence. Take note that this is also fundamentally different from the stated purpose of the Pi, as stated by its manufacturer.
- HiroshiSan 11y agoI have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.
- Udo 11y agoI have been searching for the same thing, ideally I'd like to buy an electronic scale with a digital I/O port. You may have more luck finding these in the US than I had in the EU, but in any case I wasn't able to find anything that hooks up to a computer in a non-proprietary way. As with home automation, all products seem to sync to the cloud, most of them in a one-way fashion. I lost track of this idea a few years ago, so the situation may have changed. But if it hasn't, I see the following options for you: 1) find a cloud-synced scale that offers an SDK or at least some way of retrieving the data from the cloud. 2) buy a low-cost digital scale, take it apart and see what you can do with a voltmeter and a soldering iron. At the very least, you should be able to hook into the raw analog weight data which you could feed to a Pi with an A/D board. The nicer solution would be to siphon off the digital value. Even in scales where one chip does everything you could still try to pick up data going to the LCD. However, that might require some epic cabling and soldering, not sure it's worth it. 3) cheesing it: hook up a networked camera and point it to the scale's display. You can do this with any old android phone and a remote webcam app. Have the software on the Pi (or some other computer) pull the image when you step on the scale, run OCR on it, write the value out to wherever you want.
- soggypretzels 11y agoWhat about option 2.5? Rather than hack the hardware, hack the software; buy a cloud-synced scale and sniff the traffic it sends out with the pi.
- Udo 11y agoWouldn't that be option 1.5? ;) Yes, in principle. If they are not obfuscating and/or encrypting their data, which is a big if. And you'd be bound to keeping that packet sniffer online forever, piping matching data to where you need it.
- nagash 11y agoWhy not use bluetooth and a Wii balance board? eg. https://github.com/damariei/wiiscale https://github.com/damariei/wiiscale
- nl 11y agohttp://jcehle.com/bees/2013/10/16/sensing-weight-with-raspberry-pi http://jcehle.com/bees/2013/10/16/sensing-weight-with-raspbe... https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10245 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10245 http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/weighscale/ http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/weighscale/