Fitbit Text

Just for fun, keeping a list of the chatter text the Fitbit throws at me:

• HI THERE
• HOWDY
• I LIKE U
• GO
• STEPGEEK
• HELLO
• CLIMB IT
• WOOT!
• ITS ON!
• FASTER
• IM READY
• WALK ME
• SMOOCHES
• STEPITUP
• HOLD ME
• HEY HEY!
• BON JOUR
• MOVE IT
• CHEERS
• UCANDOIT
• LETS GO
• HUG ME
• READY?
• GOOOOAL
• VAMOS
• YOU ROCK
• BURN IT
• HIGHFIVE
• LOVE YA
• WHATS UP

FileScanner

Started working on a file scanner today.  This project is a result of my cluttered hard drives.  I have music and photos and videos all over the place, with duplication, etc.  I need to consolidate them, index them, and make sure they are all stored safely on one set of RAID-1 drives.

This is also an attempt to get out of the C# trap.  Since I use C# a lot at work, it's become my go-to language.  This sucks in a non-MSFT world, like the Mac I use at home, so I'm writing the scanner in Java.  I used to have mad Java chops, but have mostly lost them over the past 4 years.  Hopefully this will bring some of that back.

Ideally, I'd like to write this in Objective C or C++, just to really push myself, but I don't want to spend a ton of time on this particular project.  Java is a lot like C#, so I'm hopeful this will be wrapped up fairly quickly.

Fitbit Sync Experiment

Managed to screw up my Win7 VM by installing the USB filter driver.  Had to go back to a system restore point.

On another note, I tried a little experiment today.  I didn't let my Fitbit sync all day so I could see if there would be a difference in the size of the data payload when I eventually did sync it.  There was.

My Fitbit sent 2380 bytes to the service.  My wife's Fitbit was home with her all day, syncing regularly, and her Fitbit only sent 784 bytes.

Need to decode the sync packets.

Fitbit One Sync Logs

My first order investigation of the Fitbit One involved the following:

• Installing the FitbitConnect software on my Win7 VM
• Setting up the device with my account
• Forcing a sync
• Finding for the sync logs

The FitbitConnect options panel allows the specification of a proxy server, so I obliged and used Fiddler to capture network traffic.  

I figured the sync logs had to be stored somewhere on the Win7 filesystem, since the FitbitConnect UI mentions them (provides a checkbox to keep them for 5 days), and so does this guy.

On my install, the logs were found under C:\ProgramData\FitbitConnect\Logs.  An example filename is log-20130104004939.txt

UPDATE: On my iMac, the log is here: /private/var/run/com.fitbit.galileod.log

Scanning the logs I see scattered bits of interesting things.

1. The server is basically in control of the FitbitConnect UI.  On almost every action, the server returns an HTML page embedded in the XML response.

2. Among other things, the service also appears to provide the display strings to be used on the device.  For example, here is part of the data blob that the service provided in one of its responses:

    0000020: 0b00 5045 5445 5220 2020 2020 4855 4720  ..PETER     HUG 

    0000030: 4d45 2020 2020 5741 4c4b 204d 4520 2020  ME    WALK ME   

    0000040: 4845 5920 4845 5921 2020 0000 0000 0000  HEY HEY!  ......

3. The server classifies me as "obese".  While I can't disagree with this, it caught me by surprise that this is part of my account profile.

            var props = {

                'Android App Version': '',

                'iPhone App Version': '',

                'Has Android App': false,

                'Environment': 'prod',

                'Has iPhone App': false,

                'User Age Range': '35-44',

                'Body Type': 'obese',

                'Gender': 'male',

                'Locale': 'en_US',

                'Premium': false,

                'Premium Expired': false,

                'Platform': 'Fitbit Connect',

                'Facebook Linked': false,

                'Height': '76.02362',

                'GoalPrimary': 'steps',

                'GoalWeight': '',

                'Operating System Version': osVersion,

                'Paired Aria': false,

                'Paired One': true,

                'Paired Zip': false,

                'Paired Flex': false,

                'Paired Ultra': false,

                'Paired Classic': false

            };

More later.  Planning to add a USB filter driver to capture traffic at the dongle.

Fitbit One

Gave the wife a Fitbit One for Christmas.  She's really enjoying it, and today (yesterday?) I bought my own.

Unfortunately, my interest is less about fitness and more about learning how it works... though I am interested in the fitness side of it too.  (For example, I'm sure it will be frowning at me tomorrow for the amount of sleep I'm not going to get tonight.)

WTF! Moment

Just had a funny WTF! moment.

As mentioned in my previous post, I've been working on things related to audio output.  Tonight I breadboarded a simple amplifier using an LM386.  I decided to run a smoke test, and connected it to the 5V output on the LM3S1968 board with the input open.

When I turned it on, I got light buzzing.  I decided to see what happened when I moved the 10k pot... suddenly, my speaker was spewing forth a synthesized voice.  I was shocked and moved my hand... the sound stopped.  Touching the pot again caused the voice to return.

I soon realized that I was picking up some local AM radio station (I could also hear other stations in the background), but it is quite the conicidence for that station to be running an interview with Roger Ebert, who uses a synthesized voice??!

I momentarily wondered if I had gone mad. :-)

Back to Electronics

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote anything here.

These days I'm back to piddling about with electronics/robotics.  Sure, I can't seem to find my book on netting... but I don't think that's the reason I've swung around. :-)

I've pulled all my crap out of boxes, and set up what wifey calls a "cave" in the spare room.  That's a pretty accurate description--I'm packed in with other stuff at a little desk in a small room.

My focus these days is on some sort of smart, extensible toy for kids (and hackers), which has got me doing a lot of reading about how Text-to-Speech technology works (since you can't have a smart toy that doesn't TALK!).

I'm all for making things difficult on myself, so my current project is trying to use the little LM3S1968 board (used this earlier in the year to make Lucas a game) to do some formant speech synthesis.  I don't think this will be super hard, but there's enough tech/math involved to make it an interesting challenge.

We'll see how far this renewed interest takes me.