I used a cereal bowl filled with mini-M&Ms. 1 for #1, 2 for #2.
How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#32The internet of shit
Remember the 's' in IoT stands for security.
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#33Love it, great use of technology and the poop emoji! I probably just forgot but I don't remember our kids getting up in the middle of the night during potty training. Of course we didn't even try until they were 3, you know what they say: potty training a 3 yr old takes a couple days, potty training a 2 yr old takes about a year.
Going through it right now, looking forward to the end of it.
Not having to buy diapers anymore is fucking glorious, but it's also a double-edged sword. No more spending money on Amazon for diapers, but now you have to make sure they pee often, especially before car rides because you could find yourself in an emergency really quickly.
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#34Love it, great use of technology and the poop emoji! I probably just forgot but I don't remember our kids getting up in the middle of the night during potty training. Of course we didn't even try until they were 3, you know what they say: potty training a 3 yr old takes a couple days, potty training a 2 yr old takes about a year.
That's not true at all:
"But over the last few decades, the age at which toddlers become diaper-free has been creeping upward. In 1957, 92 percent of children were toilet-trained by the age of 18 months, studies found. Today the figure for 2-year-olds is just 4 percent, according to a large-scale Philadelphia study. Only 60 percent of children have achieved mastery of the toilet by 36 months, the study found, and 2 percent remain untrained at the age of 4 years."
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/12/us/two-experts-do-battle-o...
The biggest difference that affects potty-training today is the time available for parents to dedicate to it, it has nothing to do with the children.
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#35My IoT button is stuck to the washing machine. It uses AWS Step Functions and SNS to text me an hour after it's pushed to tell me the laundry is done. Unnecessary? Completely. Useful? Heck yeah.
I'd like you to find a way to get an alert when it's done without having to press the button first.
Motion sensor seems like the easy solution there. My washer dryer shake a lot when they're going...
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#36I just looked up the IoT button. $20, non-replaceable battery, not shipping to Canada. I don't have the skill or resources to assemble it in a nice form factor, but how are there not dozens of cheap Chinese alternatives? An ESP8266 is like $5 and the rest of the parts are probably less than a dollar. I guess it's just a bit surprising that I cannot find a cheap alternative to buy a dozen of.
My approach was to buy a bunch of 433Mhz radio-based "alarm buttons" from Aliexpress. Then I could wire up a simple radio-receiver to an ESP8266 device to handle the presses.
Or of course you could use an SDR-receiver on a PC to do something more complex:
https://blog.steve.fi/creating_an_iot_button__the_smart_way....
https://blog.steve.fi/decoding_433mhz_transmissions_with_sof...
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#37I just looked up the IoT button. $20, non-replaceable battery, not shipping to Canada. I don't have the skill or resources to assemble it in a nice form factor, but how are there not dozens of cheap Chinese alternatives? An ESP8266 is like $5 and the rest of the parts are probably less than a dollar. I guess it's just a bit surprising that I cannot find a cheap alternative to buy a dozen of.
Wondering the same, you probably don't even need a Chinese supplier given how cheap ESP8366 is, you can just assemble a device on a order basis..
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like you to find a way to get an alert when it's done without having to press the button first.
Motion sensor seems like the easy solution there. My washer dryer shake a lot when they're going...
Yup that's what I did in my toy-project:
https://steve.fi/Hardware/washing-machine-alarm/
I tried using a microphone at one point too, but that was not as reliable as just taping a sensor to the back of the machine and alerting after movement stopped.
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#39I just looked up the IoT button. $20, non-replaceable battery, not shipping to Canada. I don't have the skill or resources to assemble it in a nice form factor, but how are there not dozens of cheap Chinese alternatives? An ESP8266 is like $5 and the rest of the parts are probably less than a dollar. I guess it's just a bit surprising that I cannot find a cheap alternative to buy a dozen of.
The Amazon button probably has higher build quality than anything you can replicate or buy for $5+1. That's probably overkill for most applications aimed at adult users, but it's worth it here.
Is that cheap Chinese alternative toddler-survivable? Will the enclosure break and will delicious shiny metal sharps fall out? Is it reasonable water resistant? Is it coated in cheap lead paint that will come off when (not if) your toddler chews on it it?
Re: How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button
#40After working in DevOps and getting nightly calls from a paging service about down servers, turning my toddler into another down server seems worse than the current situation ;-) That said, this is a great, fun project for an Amazon button.