Just a bit of an update, for whomever will be reading this.
Alright well I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with work and taking care of my mother for the past two or so months. But rest assured, I’ve gotten everything that I’ve been waiting for. Some breakout boards have come in the mail and I’ve attempted soldering a couple chips onto them. But boy is it hard to solder such small things! I got a microscope and a proper solder station just for soldering those pins. Sheesh, I’ve spent like 4 hours already and there’re still a few bridged joints. So I’m taking a bit of a break from that since it’s just so difficult.
In the meantime I’ve been playing around with Twilio, which is a super neat service. I’ve fallen in love with how easy it is to use. My gosh, the possibilities! I mean, you could so easily hook something like this up to an API and boom you’ve built out IVR for a company! At first, I was a bit scared at first of toying around with it because I thought it’d be a pain in the butt to learn a new syntax or whatever, but no. So, over the course of a lunch, I played around with it and picked it up in a jiff! Super awesome.
So since my ethernet switch is on hiatus…
I’ve been thinking of an application that I’d like to build for the purpose of my mom. I’ve been trying to track her actually taking her medicine, at what time, what some of her basic health stats are… etc. So I spent some time checking out what’s out there in the open source domain, and there are a ton of options, but none that really do exactly what I want. At least with my cursory glance. So I think I’m just going to build what I want in probably laravel and throw it on my server. I kinda want to hook it up with Twilio so that it’ll call and nag her if she doesn’t update it. I think that’d be fun, she’d so love me for spamming her phone like that!
The other thing I have in the works is I want to engineer yet another IoT smart button that’ll act as a pendent for her. Something that’ll call myself and my relatives if she has a fall and can’t get up or get to her phone. Shouldn’t be too hard, but it’s just a matter of finding the time. Also, I would want to 3d print an enclosure for it so that it’d be all self-contained. But I don’t have a 3d printer… yet. I backed a couple kickstarters, but who knows if they’ll ever deliver. I think I’ll make my own PCB’s for it… who knows. The ESP01 seems like the best choice because it’s just so tiny, and I’ve got a few of them. My main concern is going to be the battery life. This thing has got to last for a long time. I do know about deep sleep mode, but it still uses some current. I’m thinking maybe a D-Flip Flop or something. Spoiler alert, that solution uses like no power and it allows me to toggle the power based off of a button.
That’s about all folks
Well I guess that’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll check back in in a few months and let you, myself, know what’s going on in my engineering life. If someone is actually for some reason reading this, you’re crazy! There’s not going to be much here, maybe one day I’ll become more active… but I highly doubt it!