I’m looking to gamify my kids chores and part of my evil dad plan is to place some buttons around the areas where they need to do their chores (e.g. the laundry) which they will bash when they’ve finished. I’ll then reward them based on time completion rate etc. So basically automating KPI’s for my children, evil indeed.
Does anyone have any suggestions for the hardware? I’d rather avoid the sorts of IoT hardware that require a rando SaaS service and rather just sends a message to my rando service instead. Definitely battery powered, lights and sounds would be a stretch goal.
Happy to cobble together something myself but need some guidance on what to do.
I’d take a look at the ESP32 if you have some experience coding under your belt, the ESP32 Feather from Adafruit is perfect for dev work but once you have a baked system I’d check out this topic from David. Connecting those to a central node could be done a few ways - I’m on the MQTT journey at the moment, but using a GET method might also work!.
The Prop-maker FeatherWing (addition to the ESP module) sounds like it also ticks all of the boxes in terms of output!
Unfortunately there arent any purpose build housings for the Feathers from what I could find, if you’re familiar with CAD, Core offered a 3D printing service (that hopefully will be coming back online soon) to make up enclosures for projects like this.
There are a whole range of enclosures available, if you have a keen eye on any the support team are more than happy to try a test fit or get internal measurements!
If this were my project I might look at this device.
Have used 2 of these with Arduino UNO micros to transmit outside temperature.
Pretty easy to get going and not as complex as ESP32. A bit cheaper too.
(I have played with a Feather device, excellent product)
Also 433MHz probably will have more range.
The external antenna may lead to damage if the kids are rough.
Separate channels could be setup for each button device to a main device.
As far as the micro goes, the Pololu A-star range would be good, small and Arduino compatible.
Will run direct of a LiPO.
Another option might be the Raspberry Pi Pico, pretty cheap; Python program and could interface to 433 modules.
