I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed

Summary

I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed Posted on July 18, 2026 Now that I have your attention, let's break that down a little bit. I recently purchased a Sleep.me Chilipad 2.0, which is a system that allows you to control the temperature of your bed using a thin, water-filled mattress topper that's connected to a device that contains a pump, reservoir, and thermostat. It was $1700. Yes it's ridiculous. I know. I make software engineer money, I'm single, I live alone, and I don't have kids. Sue me. I'll provide a serious, grown-up justification in just a second, but for now "la la la can't hear you." The idea is that it helps regulate your body temperature while you sleep if you have trouble doing it yourself, don't have AC in your bedroom, etc. The device allows you to set desired temperatures throughout the night, put this on schedules that apply on certain days of the week, etc. The manufacturer also provides a developer API, so immediately there was no world in which I didn't do some bullshittery with this. The result is a tool called bedctl. I named it that way for two reasons: There's a long history of "control" programs having names that end with -ctl. In my head bedctl is pronounced "bed cuttle", which sounds like "bed cuddle", which is cute. Sleep Our understanding of how the human body works is constantly evolving. This is good. However, between grifters on social media, biased research funded by industry, and the evolving understanding provided by science I mentioned earlier, you could sometimes reasonably convince yourself that there's evidence to support the claim that juggling live salmon cures male pattern baldness. I have a PhD in physics. I built lasers that spit out 80 femtosecond pulses, and I did quantum mechanics simulations. I am so scarred by that experience that my default stance on science-related (which includes health) headlines and social media posts is "bullshit until proven otherwise", where "proven" includes but is not limited to...