I've been trying to wake up earlier in the morning. The trouble is that alarms wake everybody up, not just me. To get around this problem, I recently bought the cheapest Fitbit I could find, having learned that they have a neat silent alarm.
The truth is, if I had the cash I would rather have bought an Apple watch. When I got the Fitbit, my programmer brain immediately jumped to the question; "How can I hack this thing?"
I ended up learning a bit about Fitbit, OAuth and the Twitter API. I also learned that sometimes it's better just to get an Apple watch...
The code for this tutorial can be found on Github.
Getting Started
I decided to try using the silent alarms as a notification system. I would check for new Twitter direct messages, and set an alarm as quickly as possible. That way, when I felt a silent alarm I wasn't expecting, I could check Twitter...
It turns out both Fitbit and Twitter have JSON APIs, and both authenticate with OAuth. I began by creating a new Lumen app which would serve as the task scheduler and communicator for this project:
composer install laravel/lumen .
Lumen is really just a slimmed-down version of the Laravel framework. There are a few things disabled by default, and other things set to "light" alternative implementations. Everything you build in Lumen can be ported to Laravel, so I thought I would try it out and see if it was both fast enough and featured enough to handle the communication.
Continue reading %Hacking the Fitbit – Emulating a Pager for Twitter DMs!%
by Christopher Pitt via SitePoint
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