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.

Continue reading Hacking bathroom scales with an Arduino – the easy way

Monitoring BT Home Hub 5 usage

I’ve been working on collecting BT Home Hub 5A usage by connecting with PHP + cURL and extracting data from the status page. The last piece of the puzzle is figuring out the roll-over point of the data counter; it resets when it reaches a high enough level.

BT Home Hub 5A helpdesk screen
BT Home Hub 5A helpdesk screen

I collected data every second for a few hours while repeatedly downloading linux torrents (I have unlimited usage) and here are my results.

Continue reading Monitoring BT Home Hub 5 usage