Inverted Standing Desk

[@davetreadwell]

Worth noting that the flexlispot desks use the same control board/interface as many other brands - including the IKEA UPPSPEL

[@Mellow_labs]

That's great to know thx!

[@25566]

Shame that I can't find only the control board, I'm using a drill to raise/lower my ikea desk because it came with a manual crank (i am a cheap bastard) and all I need are the buttons now to make it look good

[@sierpus]

@@25566I’m afraid buttons are not all you need. You also need a motor :)

[@davetreadwell]

@@25566 Not too hard to gut the drill and use the motor/speed controller to fashion a button interface? Alternatively, you can get the legs alone for around £100

[@davetreadwell]

@@Mellow_labs they all use control boards/buttons made by JIECANG

[@MaDFsX]

I've seen those magnetic door/window sensors being used as a sitting-down sensor. You just have to mount the two parts on the different parts of the gas spring of your chair so that the contact closes when you sit down (and the gas spring compresses). They're cheap and power efficient and usable for all sorts of hacks, if you're creative enough :D

[@dogafrazao]

That what I use for my sensor, works wonders, battery last months on end

[@timmrobertz9]

That's nice! If you still want to use the pressure sensor, you can still use an aqara door sensor. You just need to open the case and desolder the magnetic reed sensor and instead of it, you can solder in the pressure sensor.

[@twotired479]

A solder free way of doing this can be done with the Aqara water sensor, which uses two small nuts with an allen head as the contacts on the bottom of the device. You can loosen them and loop a terminal or bare wire under them, then run that to the pressure sensor.

[@BenCos2018]

that's a neat idea auctully

[@ben.alldridge]

If you wanted to get really tech, you could integrate Qi into your chair and have an inductance loop that charges the battery?

[@jackipiegg]

4:43 You could easily get those aqara/ikea coin cell powered zigbee remotes and solder the points for your chair sensor. Its cheap + battery lasts a long time.

[@davetreadwell]

sadly IKEA coin cell based things are being phased out as IKEA stopped selling non-rechargable batteries a year or two ago, and has been phasing out products that require coin batteries, and introducing replacements that use 1.2V rechargeable AAA batteries

[@jackipiegg]

@@davetreadwell Then it's even better using those. Never use esp32 for battery projects, its horrible. For battery, use zigbee already made products and mod the heck out of it is my philosophy.

[@DarkFoxDK]

Check out the aqara leak sensor for the chair sensor. It has exposed terminals that you can connect wires to.

[@markharding7140]

that's what i use for my bed sensor. pressure sensor under the mattress and then linked to one of them

[@ced2k]

But then you have to take a leak on your chair every time...

[@DarkFoxDK]

@@ced2k 😂

[@BenCos2018]

could use a zigbee door sensor and solder that to the internal pads inside the sensor and remove the reed switch same for the moisture sensors (I saw a guide somewhere for that)

[@Mellow_labs]

I’m already waiting for parts, i’ll make sure about it when it arrives

[@BenCos2018]

@@Mellow_labsnice I've been considering doing something like that myself (My desk controller has the control in the screen though so I'd likely have to redesign it though sadly

[@strelkomania]

that car chair pressure sensor is neat! cool video :)

[@samiraslan9735]

You can connect the seat sensor to aqara door sensor and it will last forever!

[@Mellow_labs]

ill look into that, thx for the tip!

[@sourbrambles]

This

[@ctjameson]

This right here. Suuuuuuper long batt life.

[@aeliassen]

I see alot of people reccomending the doorsensor hack for getting the pressure sensor in HA. But there is an even simpler solution. The Aqara water leak sensor. It has two metallic screws underneath that trigger the sensor if they are connected. Just loosen the screws, and attach the pressure sensor.

[@the_smart_home_maker]

Nice project! For the seat sensor, couldn’t you just use a cheap Zigbee window contact sensor and just replace the reed switch with the seat sensor?

[@HowardRoberson]

I think the reason you have to click it twice is because it is a switch (on/off) verses a button press (down/up.) You might try setting up a "change device type" helper.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Another alternative to using the sensor would be a load cell. You calibrate it as a switch and once your weight is off the load cell, it closes or opens it and the desk stands. That can be integrated into the chair frame, so you still retain the mechanism in case you decide to change the seat or something like that.

[@davetreadwell]

except it needs recalibrating after every christmas dinner

[@ChrisHorton343]

You can use the same sensor and use a zigbee door sensor to do the same thing.

[@v1ncen715]

I d be interested in the esp32 version which allows to keep the original controls. Might be a good safety measure as well..

[@tonysouthern3017]

I took a slightly different tack. Used a presence sensor to detect if I was in front of the desk, and an ultrasonic range finder sensor to see how high the desk is. An esp-01 checks these inputs and hooks into Alexa who Buggs me if I am either sitting or standing for a period in excess of predefined thresholds. Builds a web page to display the sit stand periods over a day and week.

[@Mrcaffinebean]

This is freaking genius man. I have this exact issue and this is the perfect solution!

[@mateuszdrab]

Accidentally came across this video and now I gotta get this running, I already got all the components in my spares ❤

[@Gregulations]

I need this in my life.

[@CrudeButEfficient]

That's a really neat hack! I guess it's the liability issue that prevents it from being a standard feature in those tables...

[@mitchellmnr]

For the chair, what you can do is write your own code isntead of using the pre-built tools. In your own code you can make it deep sleep/sleep. But overall the key is this: When chair status changes, connect to wifi, post to mqtt (you can link a binary sensor in HA to an mqtt value) So by doing that, you should be able to get a lot more time on the battery (months/years) - and only changes get published. Downside is its custom code and you have to manually link/create the binary sensor in HA ... but upside is extremely long battery life. You can extend this with an RTC - you could say force the RTC to wake the esp every hour - post battery level and force update seat position - just so it is always in sync. But the chair sensor to a wake up pin should do the job to trigger on changes easy :)

[@Mrcaffinebean]

I wonder if that extra time spent connecting would slow it down though.

[@elongated_muskrat_is_my_name]

You should see if you can hook one of those qi wireless chargers up to the chair and one to theside of the table so you just have to position the chair against the table for it to recharge

[@mathcale]

Nice project! I made something similar with my standing desk, but instead I soldered some wires to the control panel buttons and plugged a Raspberry Pico W to receive commands from a MQTT topic

[@Tech_Verse]

Nice, do you have a guide or link for it?

[@mathcale]

@@Tech_Verse yup, it';s on my github under the repo mathcale/standing-desk-alexa-integration :)

[@AkosLukacs42]

This is a great idea!

[@Mellow_labs]

Glad you think so!

[@Flotomation]

Just use the cheapest Door/Window Zigbee Sensor, replace the reedcontact with the pressure Sensor. I did the same, you can check it out 😊

[@gearscodeandfire]

Awesome vid 🤘

[@simonparkis9301]

Can you please provide a link to the github repository you are mentioning in the video?

[@thisleejones]

Hey there, thank you for this video. I have several M5STACK Atom Lite which are ESP32-PICO based devices, they have limited pinouts compared to typical ESP dev boards, the pinouts are SCI, SDA, 5V, GND, 3.3V, RX, TX with 2 additional GPIO pins. You can buy an RS232 base for these. If I buy these RS232 bases can I attach these to an RJ45 breakout as the input from the standard controller and have another breakout connecting the RX and TX from the ESP32 and the input RJ45 breakout to the control box so I have a passthrough system? Please excuse my ignorance and bold question. I would love to use these items as I have them to hand, except the RS232 base and they are also very compact. I have two identical Flexspot desk that I would much rather have programatic control over and maybe do similar to what you do. I typically keep the desks in the upright position and would like to find a way to add collision detecion/aviodance in future so that I use them in the lower position from time to time without worrying I will damage anything beneath the rear (higher) desk. Any input would be greatly appreciated. KInd regards, Lee.

[@wayne_taylor]

Hi Can you link to repo that you found ? Thanks

[@Mellow_labs]

That’s strange, I was sure I did before releasing the video. I updated it, it should be there.

[@thevolvo122s]

In your chair esp use deep sleep and have the pressure sensor connected to the wake pins also. If you used a solar charging board and a single cell lithium battery with a small panel on the top back of your chair it would probably charge enough to never need to be plugged in. The swedish inventor dude on KZbin has great esp solar videos to make it efficient

[@alldave]

off the cuff, I believe you could use a wakeup pin and deep sleep or set a sleep duration

[@SianaGearz]

Home assistant... you have an ESP in the desk, that's always powered. You can add a 433MHz receiver to it, and a 433MHz ook sender to the chair. Now it would be ideal if just the normal doorbell sender could be put to use, but you have the problem, that the doorbell button is very efficient when it's not pressed, lasts for years on a cr2032, but not necessarily when it's pressed, and you have the situation that the chair is both pressed and not pressed for long periods of time, so you might as well have a micro that is nearly always sleeping do its own sending, and have two different messages for sat down and stood up. You won't reach quite the doorbell circuit efficiency, but it would be an improvement. Pick a micro with good sleep behaviour for the transmitter, an attiny is "fine" if you know what you're doing, some things are better than that, say msp. You want a little redundancy when working with 433, like re-send a copy of the message 5 seconds later maybe once or twice. But don't hammer it or your neighbour's thermometer stops working. I suppose you might as well wake up every 5 seconds to do the butt weight measurement, and then you can have a little state machine on top of that.

[@Ernzt8]

I have a cat who prevents me from sitting down again whenever I get some coffee. However, because of my slanted roof it's not possible to place a standing desk. That's why my back hurts bending over.

[@franganghi]

I'd like to provide you with a nice advice. Hope you'll appreciate. That chair is a killer. Take a wooden chair with hard surfaces, no wheels and a 90 degree fixed angle. Use that instead. Your body will learn to sustain itself and your backpain will be gone for good. The less comfortable the chair, the better for your back. Your body prefers to hold itself! The best thing that happened to me during the lockdown was that my office chair broke. My chiropractor totally agrees with me.

[@alldave]

I was half expecting the desk to go terminator and come down and squish you

[@c.s.7474]

Buy an aqara door/window zigbee sensor, solder pressure sensor to it. boom done

[@MatkoHR94]

Use a aqara door and Window sensor and solder the seat sensor on this. This Was my solution.

[@D-Khaz]

Just take a zigbee door sensor and wire in your butt sensor into it. My aqara ones even have the points broken out to a header on the PCB…

[@ctjameson]

Bro just wire up the seat sensor to a sharp zigbee or zwave reed switch sensor. It’s just a NO switch. Sit down, circuit complete. Battery for months.