Cloud-enabling a bathroom scale for automated weight tracking #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Hack a day posted about this awesome weight tracking scale from irq5.io. Check out more on the project here.
Last week as I was making my rounds at the supermarket, I came across this digital bathroom scale on sale. With some membership card, the discount was almost 50% and at S$16, I thought that was a pretty good deal. It is “wireless” in that it has a separate display unit that could be detached from the scale itself. This bathroom scale had “HACK ME” written all over it.
It turns out that this bathroom scale is the EB9121 made by a Chinese (OEM?) company called Zhongshan Camry Electronic Co. Ltd (or simply Camry). The box specifically mentions that it uses infrared for transmission, and given that I had some experience looking at IR signals, I thought it would be rather straightforward.
I hooked up an 38kHz IR receiver to the logic analyzer and placed it near the scale while I was standing on it. It looks like the scale was using pulse distance coding to encode the data, and each burst was separated by a ~75ms space. The data is represented by 500µs, followed by either 500µs or 1000µs, making the total duration of each bit either 1ms or 1.5ms.
I would probably die if I had to manually mark the 1’s and 0’s on the waveform for analysis. Since I already had some code for a toy Saleae analyzer plugin lying around, I hacked it up to mark 1’s and 0’s on the waveform depending on the pulse distance. Saleae analyzer plugins can also put bubbles above a group of individual bits in order to present the decoded data for easy interpretation. Having an analyzer plugin definitely helps with reverse-engineering the protocol:
At this point, I don’t know if the (500, 500) pair represents a 1 or 0, so we’ll just pick one for now. I also don’t know if the bits are reconstructed from left-to-right or right-to-left. I made all of these into configurable options so that I could easily try out various combinations. The data can also be exported into a text file for further analysis.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 9.2.1, What is DMA, PyConUS 2025 and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!