Are You Okay? Widget

Resources and Going Further

The Electric Imp is so flexible that staying on topic can be tough. Once you’ve built one thing, it is easy to think of more features. Here are some ideas for taking this project further.

Make It Rechargeable

An easy modification is to switch to rechargeable batteries. A 2000mAh LiPo battery will last almost a year, assuming you don’t update the code a lot.

Get a LiPo charger with mini USB or micro USB.

Since LiPo batteries are tough to monitor based on voltage along, use a fuel gauge board to do the monitoring.

I created code to make that work with the Are-You-OK system, it drops in to replace the battery monitoring on the device. The hard part is splitting the I2C wires so they go to both the accelerometer or and the fuel gauge. Here is the hook up sketch.

Make It Cheaper

If the price is too high, you can make the system cheaper by replace the accelerometer with a switch: either something the user presses or a motion based switch.

You will be able to remove the accelerometer code, only using the wakeup (pin 1). However, make sure you wire this so that the interrupt doesn’t happen (and the LED doesn’t show) until after the user has released the button.

Another cost cutting area is to replace the beautiful, diffuse LED with individual LEDs and control them directly. Of course, the diffuse one is only $0.95 so to make it cheaper, you may need to buy LEDs in bulk. I’ve ignored the intricacies of LED resistors but you might want to check out the LED tutorial.

Texting and Emailing

Right now the system uses twitter but that lacks privacy (and many people don’t use twitter). However, the Electric Imp already has information and code available for texting via Twilio.

Email is also a good solution and there is a great description on how to set that up on the Imp.

Configuration Webpage

While creating a device specific HTTP URL is great for setting the only two parameters, there are others we may want to set which means doing configuration via webpage.

It is pretty silly to set up the frequency of interaction in the code. Also, it would be pretty easy to set the caregiver information and contact methodology in a webpage.

Here, I’ve made a sketch of what I want. Let me know when you are finished, all right?