glucoir

Build an IR blaster on Raspberry Pi and have a script transform your blood glucose levels into color coding of a LED strip

What's this for?

I wanted to have my desk illuminated in colors representing my current blood glucose level. I'm Type 1 Diabetic (T1D), and I need to keep an eye on my blood glucose (BG) levels. Doing this while coding would mean I'd need to have my phone side by side or a website open, that shows my BG. Being in the flow while working, this is not very convenient. So I tried to find a subtle yet acknowledgeable method. I've put a color controllable LED strip under my glass desk topping, and needed to find a way to auto remote control it's remote control.

What you will need

A LED strip, that can change RGB colors via IR remote
A Raspberry Pi (I used a 3B)
A IR receiver diode
A IR emitter diode
A breadboard
Some jumper wires
A resistor (220K Ohm)
A NightScout site that has your current blood glucose levels.

Prep

Getting the Raspberry Pi ready

You have to set up your Pi to be able to receive and emit IR commands. I followed these instructions (German language, also I kept to the default GPIO pins 17 and 18). Any Howto on this topic should do it.

UPDATE_: After an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, glucoir stopped working.

That's due to a change in the kernel and the used module for IR. Updating /boot/config.txt and replacing

dtoverlay=lirc-rpi

with

dtoverlay=gpio-ir-tx,gpio_pin=17 
dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=18

solved the issue.

Nomenclature

Name your remote control desk0 when recording and saving your IR commands. Name your color buttons "red", "yellow", "green", "orange". Case sensitive. Or adapt in the Python script.

Color coding

Make sure your personal limits for high, low and normal blood glucose are represented within the code. These limits are not retrieved from NightScout.

Install modules

We'll require the requests library and py_irsend wrapper, both available as modules and installable via pip3 (when using Python 3).

pip3 install requests
pip3 install py_irsend

Code

Python

The script should run on python 2 as it does on python 3. But I've only tested it on Python 3.

crontab -e

Edit your crontab to run the script at least every 5 minutes. I've set up cron to run it every minute:

* * * * * python3 /root/src/glucoir/glucoir-every-5-minutes.py

jansche/glucoir