Is tpope asleep?

10 Mar 2011

I was long overdue for a stupid project, so I’ve put my current sleep status online at istpopeasleep.com. Here’s how I did it:

1. I bought a Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, which is an awesome little device for tracking your sleeping habits. Basically, you wear a headband while you sleep, and the base unit records your sleep state to an SD card. Although it also has a mysterious port on the back.

2. I built this USB cable to connect to the Zeo. I have no idea why they couldn’t just use a more standard connector, but it wasn’t that hard to build.

3. I wrote Zerbo, a Ruby library for reading from the USB cable.

4. I wrote a stupid web app, API, and corresponding client. (The authentication mechanism is “simple” so it’s not open source.)

Now I hear you saying, “That’s awesome, tpope, but does it have any practical applications?” Well, no, not yet, but check out all these ideas:

1. Use Tasker to automatically mute my phone when I’m trying to sleep.

2. And so on.