Tracking Standing Desk Time

Akrasia
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Figured I would share this new integration of beeminder in my life. Despite having a sit/stand desk, I have found myself increasingly falling in to the quicksand trap of sitting. The solution? A Raspberry Pi logging my standing time to a beeminder goal (www.beeminder.com/icole/standing)

The raspberry pi set up is documented here for those interested:

I used the initial script in the tutorial to read the magnetic sensor and added some simple logging of the minutes to beeminder https://github.com/icole/beeminder_glue/blob/master/standing/desk_sensor.py.

Here are some pictures of the set up http://imgur.com/a/vhIau

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Cool, standing desks should come with these sensors built in.

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Wow, this is a really cool solution! Previously, I had thought of putting a NFC tag in another room or floor (and when your phone’s GPS shows you are in the general vicinity, you have to scan the NFC tag every X minutes), but I figured that was unnecessarily complicated. This solution is much more elegant.

For anyone with a similar goal, but is less tech-savvy, I’d recommend starting out with a little applet called WorkRave. I have it set to remind me to get up every 30 minutes and walk round a bit. It won’t track how many minutes you’re standing rather than sitting, but as I understand it, most of the harms of sitting come from prolonged inactivity of the legs, rather than total minutes standing.

I beemind each time I skip one of these prompts, and WorkRave also keeps its own internal stats. It’s still sometimes tempting to indulge in a skip, and less honest users can either not enter the skips into Beeminder. Still, it’s an effective enough nudge most of the time.

I might look into this Raspberry Pi implementation just for fun though. I’ve been meaning to get a Raspberry Pi to play around with for a while now, and this seems like a easy project to jump in with.

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Hey, I have a Varidesk pro 30 plus and I also was thinking on how to do this. Although I am pretty good with Pis I was actually thinking of using an ESP8266.
However, I also build raspberrypi distros. So if you think we could build something more complicated, like having a web sever where you login and see your progress, we could do that too.

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I’m revisiting this as I’d like to track this as well. Thinking of a few options:

  1. Use a magnetic switch sensor to track position, and a motion sensor to track activity
    Pros: Simple
    Cons: Would require multiple sensors for each position I have it in, unless I just go for binary but that would likely be unreliable (unless I possibly added additional magnets?) - movement of my desk to any other position (possible) would be problematic
    Inspiration found at Tracking Standing Desk Time
  2. Place/wire a secondary button next/on top of existing buttons
    Pros: Easy to do, doesn’t change workflow
    Cons: Requires more manual work/intervention
  3. Rewire/program the whole thing (something like Home Made Standing Desk Raspberry Pi Controller | Timmy O'Mahony)
    Pros: Looks awesome
    Cons: Looks like a lot more work :stuck_out_tongue:
  4. Manually bug me every time to enter information like someone mentioned above
    Pros: No technical work required
    Cons: Not really “automatic”
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