[Casainho] wanted to track his body weight using an app on his Android phone. He just needed a way to get the weight readings onto the device automatically. He ended up adding Bluetooth to a bathroom scale and hacking the app to grab data from it.
The scale which he hacked is a digital model, which makes it possible to read the weight data if you know what you’re doing. [Casainho] already completed a weight logging scale hack which stored the data on an SD card. So this was a recreation of that project but with a Bluetooth module for the output rather than the card for storage.
Now you can buy WiFi enabled scales, but that’s not nearly as fun as a hack like this. Plus one of those will cost you around $200 and the hardware for this version came it at only $75. It includes an LPC2103 dev board, $6 Bluetooth module, character display, batteries, and misc. supplies. The software end of the hack was helped greatly by the fact that the Android apps which [Casainho] is using are both open source.
He should also make this work with an iPhone app, nothing like Siri calling you a fat ass.
Ha! I was wondering how to do this only today.
EclipsiumRasa, if you are interested, please contact me on the discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/casainho-projects
Having a phone with a built in Scale would be amazing.
I’d prefer a tablet – I couldn’t imagine balancing on one foot on a phone.
If you can’t see the readout on the scale when you stand on it that should probably be a fairly good indicator.