You can ignore this ancient “hairball” blog post. Gather round, kids, and witness this blog post from a time *before internet-connected scales*. That’s right. Back then, we had to hack our Wii balance boards to connect them to the internet. Of course now you can buy wifi-connected scales from Fitbit and Withings. But in a olden days, you had to hack something up or even write it down on paper!
You can easily make an internet-connected scale out of a Wii Balance Board and a Linux machine:
First, find a Bluetooth dongle and configure your Linux machine to talk to the Wiimote.
Next, apply a few extra patches so that your Linux machine can talk to a Wii Balance Board.
Finally, use some Python code to upload your weight to a Google Spreadsheet.
If you’d like to hear me describe how to hook it everything together, you can watch me give a 7-8 minute talk about it (more info in that post), or you can watch it here:
Special thanks to Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf for kickstarting the Quantified Self movement and encouraging me to talk about this project.
