For a very long time I have always been fascinated with home automation. It’s soo much more than just turning a light on and off with my phone. It’s about adding intelligence to my home that makes the lives of my family better by removing unnecessary tasks and optimizing how we operate.
Example
For example - take your standard consumer HVAC forced-air system in homes today. It’s an incredibly simple system that reads the temperature from a single point (typically a thermostat) and turns on and off the heating and cooling valves based on that.
Early this year (2023), My family and I were facing an interesting issue. We were expecting an addition to our family with the arrival of our son in April/May and our house (our first) was reaching the maximum capacity that it could handle. Don’t get me wrong, we are very grateful for what we have worked to build and we have more than enough. We love the area we live in, our neighbors and our community.
Especially when the data is fun to aggregate and process. Finally some code!
I’ve been using a free Strava account for years now. It tracks my workouts and gives me some high-level information to share with friends and followers.
Desk Treadmill data
For each workout that I have been recording with the hardware from the previous post, I’ve specifically been naming them “Desk Treadmill” such that I could easily aggregate them in the future.
I will always admit that I love everything that is working for a fully remote company. I’ve battle tested the 2+ hr commute daily for longer than I cared to admit, and that time feels like a huge part of my life has been wasted. Working remotely has offered me time to focus on the things that matter, when they matter.
Focusing on work and the tasks at hand - with zero interruption - while also being able to inject random bouts of family time throughout the day that I would have otherwise not had the ability to do. This is a huge part of my life. Snack time with my daughter when I’ve been banging my head against the wall for hours.
Knowing that I wanted to have data about my use of the treadmill to backup my claims about how I perceived using it day-to-day was one of my goals. Another being, that as a cyclist and general Strava user, I knew that I already had the platform available for storing my data as well as had seen API access available (but had never used it before).
Now it was a matter of piecing the pipeline together.
