Gut Check a Tweeting and Facebooking Fridge

I have a problem, I'm trying to lose weight but I love snacking late at night. And no one knows that I even do it. That being one of my biggest hurdles, I figured why not include all my social media friends and followers in helping me. Whether they know it or not.

So I decided to hook up my fridge to the internet, with an arduino and wishield and have it post to facebook and twitter whenever I try and get myself a late night snack.

I even have a tumblr account setup to track my progress and see what else is being done with it.
http://cyancdesigngutcheck.tumblr.com

This instructable is for a lite version of it. The message is hard coded in the php file, and so is the set times it will activate. The one I have personally is also updating and running off a MySQL database for some extra tracking for opening and closing, also so I can also give the fridge a wider array of things to say if I open the fridge contained in a database as well. But what I posted will do what it says, post a message to FB and TW if you try to sneak a late night snack.

If anything doesn't seem to be working properly, let me know. I did take my version and clean it up best I could for everyone and simplify it as a starting point.

Step 1 Hardware Components

The setup of the fridge needed these parts:

Arduino Microcontroller
Wall wart to power Arduino with Center-positive 5.5x2.1mm barrel connector
Force Sensative Resistor
10K ohm resistor
WiShield
Extra Wires
Tape
1 or 2, those kinda squishy cabinet door bumber things that make them not sound like there getting slammed hard.
Breadboard (options, but very useful also a zip tie can be handy)
A web server running PHP. (You cannot trigger the facebook and twitter apps without it being on a live server (at least it wouldn't work when I tried it).

Comments

[danielvettorazi]

Man!! nice work!!
i am following you on tumblr ,now!

i was trying i similar project with a candy machine (every time that i eat a candy, the machine would post a message on my facebook wall!)
but i had to stop the project cuz i couldn't do the facebook conexion to my php...
BUUUT your tutorial will help me a lot!!!

one question:
i need to have an online website on a live server or can i use my own apache server to run the php code?
cuz i can't generate my own permanet permission... =/

ah, and i guess that the opened.php is missing a ".php" on line 43, doesn't?

anyway... please help me and thank you thank you so much for this tutorial!!!

sorry my poor english, is not my native language!
greetings from brazil!

[cyancdesign]

Thank you! Yes, for the facebook connection you have to be able to connect to the opened.php file from outside of your local network. So if you want to keep it all on your local computer, you'd probably have to do some port forwarding work to make it accessible. The facebook apps cannot run off of localhost setups, as far as i know. Wait, i just looked really quick, this may help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5133075/running-facebook-application-on-localhost

And for the missing .php, I have my server set so index.php is the default loaded page, so it is optional to include that for me. You may have to add index.php depending on how your server is setup.

Cheers!

[Linzielegs]

OMG I love it!!! Well done, I think it's fantastic :)

[cyancdesign]

Thank you.

[Grissini]

nice work man. I especially like the angry eyes. Fridges with character. I had a similar thought, but I'm stuck in a hotel without my router, But 2 fridge hacks in a week. Gotta be some Polter Zeitgeist out there.

[cyancdesign]

Thanks, i felt it right to make the fridge look a little more lively too.

[velogirl]

i love gut-check fridge! great job!

[cyancdesign]

Tankies!