[the_pwner224]

When I saw the title I was prepared for a great hack. Something that truly belonged on Hacker News. But this seems a lot more lame.

"I made lighting controlled by a ESP32, then put it inside the brush and connected the button to it."

But reading the twitter replies further down the chain, it seems the toothbrush sends data to the charging base, and the ESP resides there and analyzes the signals sent to the base? Much more interesting. Twitter's character limit really killed this post.

Unrelated, all the hashtags and @s make Twitter quite hard to read. The @ and # characters should be hidden for readers.

[imduffy15]

Can help fill in some of the blanks for you. The toothbrush has bluetooth. Its bluetooth advertisement contains information about its operating state (running, idle, etc.), mode (brush, daily clean, etc.), pressure and some other things. The ESP32 chip scans bluetooth, detectes these advertisements, parses them and extras the data. It then sends it over to home-assistant.io which can use the data to trigger actions on any other connected device.

[imduffy15]

Code can be seen on this commit https://github.com/imduffy15/esphome/commit/90c3cb62b37e9ce3... there are likely bugs :D

[RyJones]

We had some great demos of AllJoyn[0] at CES doing stuff like this. It would have been great, had it lived. As I recall, Philips had a smart toothbrush that gamified brushing for kids. We had it integrated with Xbox and a home grown smart mirror.

[0]: https://github.com/alljoyn

[SlowRobotAhead]

Right, he didn’t modify the toothbrush to do anything. Just picked up the BLE message going out and used that to trigger his lights which itself is just sending out a different BLE message as I understood it.