For the last couple weeks my roommate Sam Shames and I have been holding each other accountable to waking up at 6:00am.

I want to start getting more insight into my sleep schedule and I love tracking data about myself, so this was the perfect opportunity to play around with an AWS IoT button my coworker had just given to me. One click could log a wake up time and two clicks could log a bed time. I just keep the button right on my bedside table and boom: fool proof sleep tracking.

Obviously this won’t track the exact time I fell asleep but I’m more concerned with identifying patterns of when I enter my room to go to bed and how those times affect my wake up times.

info One thing to note is I already have a personal “Life API” called Roots (username: demo@example.com password: password if you want to check it out) I use to track other areas of my life. All I needed to do was add a few endpoints that could log my wake up/bed times.

It was surprisingly simple to set everything up. Create an AWS Lambda Function, make my IoT Button the trigger, and have the Lambda Func hit my personal Life API.

First step is creating an AWS account if you don’t already have one. Then head over to the Lambda Service and hit the Create a Lambda Function button.

I then choose to use a Blank Function since I knew that I wouldn’t be interacting with other AWS services and instead would be writing some custom code to hit my own API.

Next you need to configure what will trigger the function being called. AWS makes this extremely easy by allowing you to add an IoT button directly.

To set up the button you need to enter the serial number (found on the back of the button) and click on Generate certificate and keys . The directions are very self explanatory, just follow along and configure your button to be able to use your local WiFi.

The last step is to set up the code that gets called when our button gets triggered. I decided to just inline my function using the Node.js runtime since it was the fastest/easiest way to get it working.

Below is the code I used for my Lambda Function.

add_alert Note how I used the event.clickType to determine if the request should be a wake up click or a bed time click.

; exports.handler = ( event, context, callback ) => { console .log( 'Received event:' , event.clickType); const http = require ( 'http' ); let path; if (event.clickType === "SINGLE" ) { path = "/wake_up_times" } else if (event.clickType === "DOUBLE" ) { path = "/bed_times" } else { path = "/ping" } const options = { host : 'api.spencerdixon.com' , method : 'POST' , path : path, headers : { 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' , 'Authorization' : process.env[ 'ROOTS_API_KEY' ], 'Accept' : 'application/vnd.life-api.com; version=1' , }, }; const request = http.request(options, function ( response ) { console .log( "CODE: " , response.statusCode); console .log( "HEADERS: " , JSON .stringify(response.headers)); response.on( 'data' , (chunk) => { console .log( `BODY: ${chunk} ` ); }); response.on( 'end' , () => { console .log( 'No more data in response.' ) }) }); request.on( 'error' , e => { console .log( `problem with request: ${e.message} ` ); }); request.end() };

And there you have it! How to set up an IoT button to make a request to some sort of API of your choosing. I’m excited to start using the button in the following weeks and see if I can identify any interesting patterns in my sleep schedule.

Next step is to make some additions to my Roots React UI so I can see the information in a nicely formatted table/D3 charts.

Cheers 🍻