A team of developers / users have created an open source realtime remote monitoring, alarm and glucose prediction system for it. It uses a USB OTG cable to connect the Dexcom to a commodity Android phone, which runs a custom Android app to upload the data to MongoLab. From there, a Node.js powered dashboard gives viewers - typically parents of diabetic children - a way to monitor glucose levels remotely. In addition, a Pebble watch app lets the wearer check their glucose by just looking at their wrist, instead of having to use the bulky Dexcom monitor.
Any idea if anything like this is possible for a Medtronic CGM? Their latest model has very good pump integration but I want real-time electronic data too.
Ben West is reverse engineering the Medtronic protocol, this code can download pump settings and historic data https://github.com/bewest/decoding-carelink/tree/cgm/touch-u...
Given that one of my Internet buddies runs a table planning software company I probably should have bought her a license on general principles.
A scan engine works by sweeping a laser across the barcode and using the light intensity at different points to determine where the bars and spaces are relative to each other. A modern scan engine will usually output what data was in the barcode, but an undecoded scan engine outputs a continuous stream of data indicating the light intensity received from the laser.
If I recall correctly, they had a bunch of timing marks on the floor that the robot would follow, and they were scanning these using the engine. You could keep a robot on-track in this way because, if the laser is angled relative to the timing marks a large part of the sweep isn't going to contain any marks and so the robot needs to correct. Then it's just a matter of servo'ing down the line.
I would never have thought to do something like that so it was probably the best call I'd gotten all year.
The normal use case is to curl your tracking URL at the end of your crontab line, so seeing 25k events coming in over 48 hours clued us in that Cronitor was being used for something different than we expected.
Turns out, the user needed to do a big one-time batch processing of thousands of records and wanted to keep track of how many were done, and wanted to be alerted when the process was complete. By curling his tracking URL at the end of his event loop, he could leave behind his workstation and trust that he would be notified when the batch was done.
(If you want to know a little more about Cronitor, check out an awesome blog post from my co-founder, The First Paying Customer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020980)
Back before cell phones, Motorola sold a lot of walkie-talkie type radios. Most of these were 'ruggedized' (encased in big thick yellow/orange rubber padded boot). One day, Motorola engineers came up with a 'better' padded boot they thought would help the radios survive a fall.
But they got complaints from the Air Force. So they investigated..
It turns out that the Air Force mechanics need to 'chalk' their airplanes to track state (bombs loaded, fuel loaded, etc). But the mechanics were always loosing their chalk. So they would just 'scrape' the plane with the (padded) back of their radios, and it would leave a (non-permanent) mark like chalk. The 'improved' padding didn't work the same way, so they asked Motorola to keep selling the old padding (and they did).
(Heard this a long time ago. Really fuzzy on all the details, but I'm sure it's true.)
a) Someone I knew opened up a store that sold surveillance equipment. I aligned myself with his store, trained his staff and booked my appointments out of it.
b) After a few months, I started to focus on small business instead of residential installs.
c) I have a combination of strong technical and writing skills. Whenever I finished an install, I would give the client a customized report where I explained what I did, documented what types of cameras we installed, documented the lines of sight that we covered, went step by step through everything she would need to do, and gave my contact information. Those reports became biz dev.
Having a location was especially valuable to me because the surveillance industry is all about trust. Without a storefront, I would have been some guy in his late 20s who worked out of his apartment and knew quite a lot about breaking into places.
I moved into the small business market because there were unexpected quirks with the residential market. To put it gently, there are really three kinds of people who need surveillance cameras. The majority (I hope) own a home and are scared of being taken advantage of. They may own some collectible cars, or they may have a valuable baseball card collection and they want some additional security. Some people have in-home child care and want to be able to check up on the child care provider. Those people are excellent. Another group of possible clients are drug dealers/miscellaneous criminals who have property they want to protect. And, a third group lives in a different reality than I do.
One particular customer wanted to hire me to install hidden cameras in his ex-wife's house. He thought that she was cheating on him and wanted to catch her in the act. And yes, this was his ex-wife. Or, another fellow wanted cameras because he was convinced that the RCMP broke into his house at night and injected him with mind control drugs to keep him addicted to drugs. And several men came in wanting hidden cameras installed in their bedrooms, pointed at their beds. There must have been a rash of pillow thefts going on or something....?? ;)
Long story short, sometimes the residential side just felt really dodgy and I was always very concerned that people were lying to me. And, since the kinds of people who need security are often paranoid (they have a reason), it was very hard to read residential customers. Consequently, I left a massive amount of money on the table. But, it didn't seem worth the risk to me because the storefront and the fact that I had an inventory of security cameras to work with gave me access to the small business market.
Small business is all the fun of residential with some added bonuses.
a) Small business setups are significantly easier to plan than in-house setups. For example, how would you set up hidden cameras in a two storey, 1950 square foot house when a client is concerned that her babysitter is abusing her children? Do you put hidden cameras in every room? If so, do you use all wireless and risk getting into interference/interception problems? Does the customer have the budget for a 16 channel DVR? On and on...
b) Small business owners are significantly easier to deal with. For the most part, they're either pissed off with shoplifters or they're scared one of their employees is stealing from them. This is easier to work through than someone who is concerned about gangsters breaking into his grow op.
c) Small business owners tend to know other small business owners, so if you can get six setups on your own, those six people will help you line up your next projects.
The biggest downside to small business is that if you don't have a storefront to work out of, they can be a very hard group of people to market to.
Long story short, I had some success, but I feel like my particular circumstances had more to do with the success than any particular strength of the market. This is a strong market, but it's a strong market with some problems that can make it somewhere between dangerous and stressful to serve.
You don't really need that much electrical experience for running low-voltage Ethernet, but you will need some and you need common sense, some basic construction skills, more common sense, some planning skills, and a bit more common sense. Keep in mind that you're going to be putting holes in walls, putting up new faceplates, etc. and you don't want to put them in crooked or leave a mess. Keep in mind that it's one thing for your friends to wonder "What was he thinking?" and a completely different thing for your customers / referral sources to wonder the same.
You'll need a vehicle, but it probably doesn't need to be new. Ladders, call it $1k. Cable fishing equipment, drills, saws, etc. maybe another $1k. Consumable supplies (boxes of cable, jacks, patch cables, wall plates, low-voltage mounting brackets, patch panels, etc.) will easily take another few thousand (particularly using plenum cable). You'll want to keep some quantity of equipment (cameras, etc.) on hand to do immediate fixes/replacements for your customers unless you have a good local supplier, but you may be able to avoid keeping a large stock as long as your orders have enough lead time (and you have the ability to purchase as needed). Insurance, licensing, etc. will chew some, but even so I'd say you're still looking at well under $100k to start, and certainly not $200k unless you're in a very expensive market.
With questions like those, though, I'd recommend spending at least some time working for someone already in the business.
As they were cheap and easily available due to being standard in a pack of rations, they ended up being used for... everything. The link below mentions a few of the simple can opener ended up being used, if you want a few examples and has a picture of the tool.
I recently got a call from a staff at an org that was having an individual help with her workload by using our software - she was honestly complaining that an update we had pushed out had made things so much more efficient, so that the individual they were babysitting/keeping busy/working finished their work so much faster that they didn't know what else to do with her. She wanted us to revert our update back to a state of being less efficient. (Of course we responded that we can't support that type of organizational workflow...)
We had no idea our system was used as a tool for keeping people busy for the sake of being busy and not causing trouble!
Hacking cheap furniture. Ikea actually gave them some grief for a time, but I think they backed off.
I also thought the site was going away courtesy IKEA legal, but apparently based on user feedback, IKEA is reconsidering. The original legal action was voted up here on HN last month but the follow up not so much.
See: http://www.ikeahackers.net/2014/06/inter-ikea-systems-bv-cal...
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