HydraCoaster

Devlog #8 – HydraCoaster
‎
V3 IS HERE!!!!
‎
THE PARTY ALWAYS ARRIVES
‎
Shipping a celebration and reliably delivering one turn out to be different problems. V2 marked your once-a-day celebration as used the moment the phone sent the command — so if the coaster rejected it or the reply got lost in the air, the day burned with nothing played, and it never retried. Now the day is only recorded when the coaster confirms the flourish actually ran; a bad or lost reply clears the pending marker and the next qualifying sip simply sends it again.
‎
Crossing 100% away from the coaster counts too. Log a glass at a restaurant, walk in the door, and the celebration fires the moment the coaster reconnects — no waiting for another sip. Amber pulses and ascending chirps, right on cue.
‎
NO MORE VANISHING SIPS
‎
The nastiest bug of the release: the app called itself “connected” the instant Bluetooth linked, before it had discovered where writes actually go. Everything that fires on connect — including the request for sips the coaster logged while your phone was away — hit a not-ready guard and was silently dropped. Offline sips just never backfilled. “Connected” now means ready-to-write, and a failed discovery disconnects for a clean retry. Every phone-free sip lands in your history on the next reconnect, every time.
‎
A RING WITH A PULSE
‎
The Today ring traded flat ink for an angular gradient with a liquid sheen, progress moves on a spring, and the first time it fills each day it does a quick scale pulse and pins a sparkly “goal reached” under the number — the on-phone echo of the coaster’s flourish. The streak flame bounces when your streak grows. The Awards tab got tinted icon circles on the stat tiles, earned badges on accent-washed gradient cards, badge symbols that bounce when unlocked, and a cascading entrance. Turn on Reduce Motion and all of it politely sits still.
‎
PUSH TO PARTY
‎
A Celebration Test button now lives in Settings, right under Buzz Test. Unlike Buzz Test, it respects your Sound and Light toggles, so it exercises the exact path a real goal celebration takes. A checkmark plus silence means your toggles are off — not that something’s broken.

Devlog #7 – HydraCoaster
‎
V2 IS HERE!!!!
‎
SMARTER GOALS
‎
Your daily goal can now be computed from weight, height, and activity level instead of picked from a wheel, and it scales up on hot or dry days using the same OpenWeatherMap feed that already drives reminder pacing. The Today ring shows the weather bump as a caption so a bigger goal never looks like a bug. Streaks and badges always judge against your base goal, since past days’ weather isn’t stored — that’s deliberate and documented in the code.
‎
REAL DRINK TRACKING
‎
A 61-drink catalog across 9 categories, each with a hydration factor — water is 1.0, espresso less, beer much less. Log drinks manually with the + button, or reclassify any coaster-detected sip after the fact. Apple Health entries are replaced in place when you reclassify, so Health always agrees with the app.
‎
SLEEP-AWARE QUIET HOURS
‎
The coaster no longer buzzes at 3am. Quiet hours come in three modes: off, manual times, or derived from your Health sleep data — a 14-day median of bedtime and wake, with naps filtered out and a noon-centered median so bedtimes straddling midnight don’t average to lunchtime. The phone converts your local window to UTC and rewrites it to the coaster on every connect and every half-hour weather tick, which means daylight-saving shifts fix themselves within one cycle and the firmware never learns what a timezone is. A reminder suppressed overnight isn’t lost — it fires on the first check after the window ends. Phone-side, notifications defer to fifteen minutes after wake, reminders got a snooze button, and three presets (Gentle, Standard, Persistent) scale how hard the whole system nags.
‎
One casualty: the “Respect Focus” toggle. Apple’s Focus-status entitlement can’t ride on a free personal-team provisioning profile, so the feature is compiled out behind a flag with a note on how to restore it if the project ever gets a paid developer account.
‎
STREAKS, BADGES, AWARDS
‎
A fourth tab. Today’s hydration score, current streak, and longest streak up top; below, ten badges from First Sip to a 30-day streak, a lifetime 50 liters, an early-bird sip before 8am, and a perfect calendar week. Everything is recomputed from sip history on demand — nothing is stored, so the numbers can never drift from the data. A small flame chip appears on Today once you’re two days deep.
‎
DEEPER HISTORY
‎
Week and month chart ranges, a GitHub-style heatmap of the last twelve weday got to goal, a per-category drink breakdown, and CSV export of yourentire sip history from the share button — RFC-4180 quoted, ISO-8601 dates, ready for a spreadsheet.
‎
THEMES AND A WIDGET
‎
Four color themes — Aqua (the original), Sunset, Forest, Mono — plus a light/dark override, all applied live. A home-screen and lock-screen widget shows the progress ring and
streak, updated through an App Group the moment a sip lands.
‎
THE COASTER CELEBRATES WITH YOU
‎
New firmware command: the first time you hit 100% in a day, the coaster pirps with amber LED pulses — deliberately distinct from the reminder alertby both ear and eye. It respects your sound and light preferences, fires once per day, and triggers against the same weather-scaled goal the ring shows.

Devlog #6 – HydraCoaster
‎
Today, I setup HydraCoaster with BLE and made a full-fledged iOS app! The whole reminder system is now onboard: sip detection, automatic zero-drift correction, and self-timed buzz reminders now run on the ESP32 with no computer anywhere. Sips get logged to flash and served over a custom BLE service: live weight streaming, history backfill, time sync, calibration commands, battery. The product build is BLE-only, but a dev build keeps WiFi OTA so reflashing stays cable-free.
‎
The app has a sixty-second onboarding (pair + set a goal), Today screen with a goal ring and live weight, 14-day history chart, Settings with sound/light/reminder toggles, buzz test, notification test, reset data button, and a guided recalibration flow. Sips sync into SwiftData, write to Apple Health with their real timestamps, and the phone mirrors the coaster’s reminder as a local notification.

Devlog #5 – HydraCoaster
‎
Printed and converted to V2 of the hardware enclosure (images not attached)! New CAD has an added cork base, and had to add the hardware for a buzzer as well.
‎
Made HydraCoaster fully wireless! It now streams weight over WiFi (UDP), reflashes over the air, and the USB cable is optional. I also built a notification system: a piezo buzzer plays a three-tone alert (low for hearing loss, mid for loudness, high to beat noise-cancelling), with the onboard LED flashing white in sync.
‎
The server detects sips from weight drops, and buzzes the coaster when you haven’t drunk for too long — 20 min base, shortened in hot/dry weather (OpenWeatherMap), relaxed after a good drinking session. Dashboard got a console showing location/temp/humidity/interval, a test buzz button, and persistent toggles for sound, LED, and reminders.

Devlog #4 – HydraCoaster

‎
I tested V1 of the enclosure and created a proof of concept software to test the basic hydration session system. The electronics fit perfectly but the strain gauge is offset and has less accurate readings in this coaster. I also printed the TPU cover on the wrong build plate, causing for small imperfections in the print. I plan to reprint the TPU cover and the outer wall of the coaster to be a bit taller so that there’s more wiggle room for the strain gauge.
‎
‎The software is measuring values that are really wrong, but the start and end values are equally wrong. This means the session drinking amounts are really right and I’m happy with that for now!

Devlog #3 – HydraCoaster

‎‎
I designed V1 of the HydraCoaster’s enclosure/case and tried my best to house the electronics as well as possible. I definitely will need future iterations to fix the weight mechanism and also include more features like LEDs, vibration motors, buzzers, etc. I’m really happy with what I’ve got so far and can’t wait to see this through!

Devlog #2 – HydraCoaster

‎
I switched from the FSR402s to a proper 1kg Load Cell that has much higher accuracy when connected to an Adafruit NAU7802. After some testing, the load cell returned values with accuracy down to the tenth of a gram. With the right code and design, this is the perfect component for a compact smart coaster!

Devlog #1 – HydraCoaster

‎
Hi everyone! This is my second hardware project on Stardance and I think it might be my favorite. The goal of this project is to eventually make something with a sleek form factor and the potential of being scaled into a real product. I envision a PCB, meaning I need to learn PCB design and production. However, for now, I’m prototyping with a breadboard and perf board just to learn the basics. I’ve wired an ESP 32 C6 Feather with two FSR402 pressure sensors and a passive buzzer. I’ve coded a basic OWM pull with PlatformIO and Arduino framework. It adapts drinking intervals using the temperature from OWM and buzzes accordingly. That’s all I have for now!