[spillsman] is working on a IoT startup and wanted to work and play while he tested their hardware. His company, WifiThing, is bundling the Texas Instruments toolchain and mesh networking with a sort of plug-and-play web interface. The board uses a MSP430 and two other TI Networking chips to make setting up, logging data, and controlling outputs simpler. The web interface looks interesting, but in our experience this sort of approach only saves time up to a point. Then it’s time to pull out the chip’s various bibles, ‘nomicons, spell manuals, and supporting religious documents to get the thing to work.
Though, there are some projects where you would like a simple way to log data from multiple sensors, if this can do that easily (and more importantly, cheaply) it might be very cool. We are interested to see if the open source software is easy to integrate without buying their hardware. Either way, after setting up a simple circuit to heat the coil in the breathalyzer, and translate the data into a signal usable for the chip, [spillsman] was able to record alcohol levels and even keep a, perhaps unwise to record, high-score from his phone.
[via r/somethingimade]
Naming your startup “WifiThing” is just begging for a future where “success is not one of the possible outcomes.” Can I say ‘yet another IoT startup without a definite goal and with dodgy hardware’?
Aero/fluid dynamics of that breathalyzer are very sketchy. Actual commercial ones have to follow a particular profile so you don’t get vapor clouds stuck together.
Tweet “I’m too drunk to drive + position sent to Uber?”
Damn it, you stole my idea!
Saw some idea like this on Shark Tank a couple of years ago and as I recall, none of the investors wanted to get involved due to the lawsuit potential of selling such a device.
All five Sharks actually invested and the company was just at CES.
http://sharktankblog.com/business/breathometer/
And the product has failed commercially, so there’s that.
I did something similar using the (overpriced) intel Edison and a dashboarding framework called flask. It was pretty straightforward to set up.
I never bothered to make it particularly accurate with heating and all that though.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Intel-Edison-Sensor-Dashboard-Using-FreeboardPytho/