u/Fuzzytech

Props to the Viner who dropped in over 2,200 words of review that is only mildly off-topic. For due diligence, the AI writing checkers are all in a tizzy, with some insisting it's 100% AI and others absolutely certain it's not AI. I can't really include a screenshot because it's numerous pages long, so anybody who wants to see it should head to the https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H33H4B5Q listing and look for Daniel's review from August 14th.

I'm only dropping this here because it's Mildly Interesting and reminds me of the sort of rambling I used to do a lot more of in the past, so I figured some other folks might be curious.

Being a bit on the spectrum and in Silver because I just started recently, I'm stuck with whatever alphabet soup brand items I can snag in the few seconds they exist. Because I am naturally skeptic, I usually do full teardown investigations on these items. So far this has uncovered ridiculous and sometimes dangerous problems more often than not. While other vine reviews are praising the product - sometimes obviously just based on the product listing being chewed up and regurgitated, but occasionally with legitimate insight - I'm frequently posting scathing reviews from deep inside the innards of the things.

Is this just too much and I should relax and chill and take it at face value to be more agreeable, or is what I'm doing in any way helpful?

I went down a rabbit hole trying to get a kitchen scale integrated, so I figure I may as well document it here and share my findings. See if anybody has similar needs, ideas, or whether I missed something silly simple.

My initial discovery was that there are tons of things to integrate various scales for weighing humans, but I couldn't find anything at all for existing consumer scales meant to measure food or other things down to the gram. There were a few options to get inexpensive scales and commandeer the load cell with an ESP32, at which point it gets into hardware hacking and has requirements like a known weight to calibrate. Having done scale calibration in the past, I know you can use approximates, but the accuracy bias will occur across the entire range of the load cell.

So I took the $35 Bluetooth scale I got from Amazon and dove into the guts of the comms. Some battles with needed BLE connections, endianness, and an ESPHome lambda later and I have a working sensor that has the weight from the scale as long as the ESPHome YAML is provided with the MAC address of the scale in question.

So did I miss something that was already out there? Am I the only one who wants such a thing? Would deeper details be useful to anybody? Any questions, comments, or concerns?

EDIT:

"But why?" - Multiple people so far

Completely legitimate question. ^.^ Since multiple people asked, I'll edit and answer it here.

This allows me to Integrate in Grocy to keep track of how much is left of certain foods, including consumption rate forecasts that allow Home Assistant to plan grocery trips for me much more effectively. This is the main use. I already track weight data manually but that's a pain to type in on the phone. A pair of barcodes with the item on the scale and it's Beep, Beep, Done!

I'm also getting it working with the auto-dispensers. Instead of having to punch in what it dispensed each time, it just runs and gets me the right amount hands off.

The scale handles up to 10kg (22lbs) at 1g accuracy, so there are probably other things that people could use this for, but those are my two bits of smart help.