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Hydration Tracking Project Idea (Help?)

zealee

Hello there! Hope you are all staying safe.

 

I have an idea for a project, I happen to have a few components that a friend gave to me to tinker with during this time and I had an idea for a small project. My coding abilities are lacking but I am looking forward to learning through this project.

 

The idea is for a Hydration tracking button that is connected through wifi.

 

I have a WeMos D1 Mini ESP8266 Development board that may be suited well for this. Along with an RGB Led and a simple push button.

 

Ideally I would like to track the amount of water (say a set amount from a 700ml bottle) that drink in a day. I would set the LED to change color at a specific time as to when you need to drink water again and then change when you press the button.

Perhaps a double press would remove an entry in case it was entered by accident.

 

This project may be a little to complicated for me, but I am curious as to where this community would get me started!

 

Looking forward to any help! take care!

  • What are you planning on doing with the Wi-Fi side of it if anything ?

     

    To get started you may want to think of breaking this down into a number of simpler steps e.g.:

    - reading the state of a switch as an input

    - controlling LEDs as outputs

    - using a timer to keep track of the time interval

    - communicating over Wi-Fi

     

    Jeremy Blum did a tutorial series here on Arduino which may be of some help to get you started

    Jeremy Blum Arduino Tutorials

     

    He's since published a book covering similar ground, which was recently revised.

    https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Exploring+Arduino%3A+Tools+and+Techniques+for+Engineering+Wizardry%2C+2nd+Edition-p-97811194…

     

    There is a resource site here with the videos for the book:

    https://www.exploringarduino.com/content2/

     

    Later on, if you want to start using the Wi-Fi aspect you may want to get yourself a copy of Tom Igoe's 'Making Things Talk'.

    http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920031369.do

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Thank you for the post, and the great resources!

     

    For the Wi-Fi I think it would be a great option to interface with some sort of back end that can track the input and plot it out - perhaps like a spreadsheet.

     

    Is there a way to store this data? I was looking at Blynk as well and that looked interesting!

     

    Thanks!

  • in reply to zealee

    For the Wi-Fi side of things If you want to use something pretty straight forward I would recommend ThingSpeak (https://thingspeak.com/ ), I've used it in the past with multiple platforms, from Raspberry to standalone ESP8266-07 and it has worked great for me, there are a lot of tutorials you can find online, you can check in one of my blogs ( S.H.E.L.F. V2 ) if you want to see how I did it with the ESP module, here is how the stored data looks online:

    image

    If I'm correct, you can also download that data and do with it what you want, but it's limited to something like last 8000 entries, there is also an app for Android on the Google Play store which can show you the data on your phone. There is one alternative I also know of, but haven't used yet, so I really can't say how good it is, and that is http://dweet.io/  . You've also mentioned Blynk which can certainly easily be used for this with your board, they have amazing documentation on their website, and it's really easy to get started, if all you're looking at is to show the data on an app.

     

    Milos

  • in reply to zealee

    There are a number of options for storing and displaying data.  For example, Adafruit IO is an easy to use and free but limited service that I have used: https://io.adafruit.com/

  • in reply to zealee

    There are a number of ways potentially to store the data.

     

    Usually you will find some EEPROM storage on the microcontroller device that you are using however this can be quite small so not suited to large quantities of data but in some cases may be ok for what you need.

     

    If you want more storage for data logging, then you may want to add a SD memory card onto your device. I recall one tutorial in the Jeremy Blum series (linked above) uses this approach to log location data from a GPS satellite receiver in a .csv format file which can then be opened in a spreadsheet application.

     

    You can consider wireless methods but this tends to require you to be within range of an appropriate  network in order to be able to transfer the data somewhere else, or at least store locally until you come back in range then upload. In some cases you may want to pair your device using the likes of Bluetooth to a mobile phone which can use the mobile phone data network to then transfer it somewhere else. There is also the likes of LoRaWAN radio networks which can permit relatively small amounts of data to be transmitted quite long distances...

     

    You could use a cloud based IoT service to store the data or you could send it to a second dev board located at home or in an office.

     

    May also be of interest, 'The Official ESP32 Book' by Dogan Ibrahim has an example of using a ESP32 dev board to send the data from a humidity + temperature sensor to the ThingSpeak cloud service.

    https://www.elektor.com/the-official-esp32-book

    The ESP32 is a slightly enhanced version of the ESP8266 device you currently have.