BabyPanel

The goal of this project is to setup a control panel to enable logging baby-related actions (e.g., feeding, tummy time, diaper changes) in Baby Buddy using physical buttons and using the Wi-Fi enabled Huzzah ESP8266 board.

Here's how the final product looks like:

Note

The current project was built to suit my specific needs so it might not suit yours. You should be able to tweak it to your liking but you should be able to comfortable to edit and upload the code.

Code setup

You have to define a series of variables so that the babypanel knows how to:

• Connect to the local Wi-Fi network
• Communicate with the Baby Buddy server
• Communicate with the heartbeat server

Define these settings in a user-conf.h file at the root of this repo. A placeholder file that you can copy and edit exists in src/babypanel/user-conf.h.

Compilation and upload

I'm using arduino-cli to compile and upload the code to the board. You can use the helper script compile.sh to do that.

You can also use picocom to connect to the board and see the logs with a command like the following

picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

Heartbeat setup

In order to detect that the battery on the BabyPanel has dried out, you can setup a heartbeat server that will receive a message from the BabyPanel every 30 minutes. If the server does not receive a message within a designated interval (by default 2 hours) it will send a message a ntfy.sh channel of your choosing.

To install this heartbeat listener, you can use the install.sh script from the heartbeat_listener directory, and pass it the name of the channel to send the notifications to in case of a missed heartbeat.

cd heartbeat_listener
sudo ./install.sh favorite_ntfy_channel

You can then verify that this channel is embedded in the heartbeat_listener.sh script by looking at /usr/local/bin/heartbeat_listener.sh where it should be installed. You can also verify that the listener is working by querying it with systemctl

sudo systemctl status heartbeat_listener

Physical setup

• The babypanel is powered by a 3.7V Li-ion battery - With a battery of capacity ~3400mAh, the babypanel can last for about 2 days.
• The shell is made of wood and I'm using arcade buttons, like these.
• The ESP8266 board is connected to the buttons using jumper wires, in a pull-up configuration, i.e., one end of the button is connected to the ground, via a resistor and the other end is connected to the corresponding pin on the ESP8266 board.

Here's picture of the back of the panel, showing the wiring of the buttons:

And here's a schematic of the wiring if made on a breadboard:

Pin configuration

Following is the pin configuration that I've for the HUZZAH ESP8266 board:

• D0 - Breast Feed
• D2 - Tummy Time
• D12 - Diaper Change
• D13 - Sleep - Green
• D14 - Formula Feed