This Raspberry Pi-Powered Baby Monitor Tracks a Newborn's Activity at the Push of Eight Buttons

Pseudonymous maker "Triceratops Labs" has built an impressive eight-button tool for tracking a newborn baby's habits — everything from breast and bottle feeds to stinky nappies and bathtime, logged at the push of a button by a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer.

"[This is a] baby logger for tracking various vital functions during the first few months after birth: breastfeeding, bottle feeding, wet diaper change, poopy diaper change, baby sleep, baby wake, bathing, crying," Triceratops explains. "There are a variety of apps and devices available commercially but wanted to make something open source, especially since you really only need to do this for a few months."

The project builds on the work of others: six years ago developer and new parent Tommy Gober made something much the same, though with only three buttons; this was based, in turn, on a still earlier project by pseudonymous maker "tenmonkeys". Triceratops' version vastly expands on the metrics that can be tracked — splitting out wet and soiled nappies as two separate metrics, for instance, and doing the same with breast and bottle feeding.

The idea is simple: eight buttons, labeled with pictures for ease of recognition during those late nights, are wired to the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header of a Raspberry Pi Zero W; these are monitored by a Python script that logs each push to a database, rendered to a locally-hosted web page for later analysis.

The project is documented on Triceratops' Hackaday.io page, with source code on GitHub under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.