I’ve had a fitbit wifi bathroom scale for a while. Getting the data out got suddenly more difficult when Google bought them, and I didn’t love giving that data to google. It’s finally died, and I’m looking at replacement options.
In a perfect world, I could just go to a store and buy a “HomeAssistant Ready” scale. If I can’t have that, I’d like a scale that is on my local network and exposes the last x weigh-ins as an API on the device, then I could write something to poll it.
I haven’t seen anything like those, but have turned up:
- a project to decode the bluetooth transmissions of a number of scales (after you build an ESP32 device for it)
- the Withings cloud based scale, but with a well documented API
Any other good options?
I’d guess automatic history tracking. Step on it every morning and it’ll automatically save your weight to Home Assistant or whatever so you can see if you’re gaining/losing over time.
Can’t you just use a notebook for that?
Sure, and I could also turn on/off my lights with a switch instead of having them come on when I get home, and turn off when I leave.
Who would do such a thing? It must absolutely terrible to manually flip a switch.
I don’t know what you want man. I like automating stuff so I don’t have to worry about remembering as much.
That’s crazy talk.
I suppose that makes sense, honestly I just go with “more/less than last time” lol. If I went more in depth with it I’d probably use a pen and paper.
I don’t keep track of my weight so I could be wrong here, but more/less than last time wouldn’t be very helpful as your weight can vary by the day. You need a trend over weeks to really see what’s going on. I definitely wouldn’t use pen/paper as it’s just too much data to organize and graph, but excel would be a reasonable alternative.
Sure a spreadsheet could work too, but yeah I also clearly don’t keep track lol.
Cumulatively pen and paper will add up to more effort. And I would person give up at some point. It would probably never enter my daily jabits. Realistically if on the scale everyday, the changes are so minute you won’t notice the monthly and longer duration trends.
It’s really surprising there isn’t a no bullshit option you could just buy