DeLonghi Magnifica now with Alexa

Introduction

I’ve have a DeLonghi Magnifica (ESAM 4200) bean-to-cup coffee machine and the most irritating part is turning it on and waiting for the cleaning cycle to complete – the unit turns on, heats up the water and then pumps a little through to make sure everything is clean.

Since getting an iKettle and being able to groggily say, ‘Alexa, turn on kettle’ in the morning to make the girlfriends tea, I’ve felt embarrassed by my stone-age coffee machine…

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Hacking bathroom scales with an Arduino – PCB

Bare scales PCB
Bare scales PCB

A few weeks ago, I started work on internet connected bathroom scales, and I finally received my custom PCB’s to finish the job. I discovered that most digital scales use strain gauges to calculate the amount of weight on them, meaning there is almost no mechanical movement making them perfect to interface with.

The set of scales that I purchased handily had the Wheatstone bridge markings on the PCB silkscreen, which made connecting up the ADC nice and easy. Continue reading Hacking bathroom scales with an Arduino – PCB

Hacking bathroom scales with an Arduino – the easy way

Scales
 

For a while I’ve wanted to connect some scales to my home network to track weight day by day automatically. Its great having scales, but unless you can remember or write down the previous readings, its pretty useless if you’re looking to track performance. So I set about figuring out a way of getting an accurate reading from a set of cheap bathroom scales with an Arduino.

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