2letters – F15 60-223: Intro to Physical Computing

Wearables & Out in the World: Repman, the Perfect Workout Companion

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 08:48:57 +0000

by Jonathan Dyer, Anatol Liu, Kiran Matharu

Our team got the idea for Repman because one of our team members is a collegiate athlete and because of that, even though he has been lifting for years, any time he has lifted it’s always been with a trainer. Until just recently, when he had a peculiar experience – lifting while keeping his own keeping sets, reps and most importantly tempo all on his own. Any experienced lifter understands that tempo is very important in the weight room and it is often hard to keep on your own. So our group set out to correct this problem by creating Repman, the Perfect Workout Companion.

Repman counts your reps as you go and vibrates when you have completed your set. It then waits for a set rest period, and vibrates three times when it is time to start the next set. At this point, the user can get into position and tap the wristband to start the next set. Repman works on multiple workouts, including benchpress, curls, and even shoulder press. It can be used throughout your entire workout without distracting from it, since it doesn’t require any outside devices like phones.

For our first design we used a store bought wristband, made a pressure sensor to be used as a button and housed the Light Blue Bean on the top of the wrist. The idea from our initial design came from talking to other members of Carnegie Mellon’s football team and researching existing designs for similar wearables. The picture shown is of a wristband that has the same functions as our wristband (and more) called the “push” band (http://www.trainwithpush.com/). Our Wrist Band accomplished the same design with a 3D printed casing and would attach by sewing it into the wristband.

After being told by our teachers that people would likely prefer to simply tap the wristband while working out to use it, we researched CapSense buttons and how to use them. CapSense added several complications that prohibited us from developing a more through design for the casing of the band. We were also told to expand our sensing to several other workouts by making our peak/trough detection algorithm more robust which we were able to do and the improved code is below. We also added the ability to keep track of rest periods, buzz when the rest period is over and start the next set. For our next iteration of the project, we plan to create a simple phone app that will allow the user to input their own sets and reps, refine the casing and improve our peak detecting algorithm even more.

Repman uses a Light Blue Bean microcontroller, conductive fabric (for a Capsense button) and a vibe motor. The schematic of the circuit only requires a few pins of the Light Blue Bean. A vibe motor is connected between Pin 3 and a ground pin. Pin 4 is connected to conductive fabric on the outside of the wristband, which acts as a button. The Arduino CapSense library is used to sense taps on the button. Lastly, the ground pin needs to be grounded, so it pin is connected to conductive fabric on the inside of the wristband. This makes it so that the person wearing the wristband touches the conductive fabric and acts as the ground for the capacitive touch sensing. A detailed picture of the circuit digram can be found below:

In this code, we wait until the start button has been pressed. After the start button has been pressed, we start looking for reps. Each time a rep has been completed, we increment a rep counter variable by one. Rep detection works by taking acceleration data and detecting if there has been a peak or valley. This is motivated by the fact that doing a rep entails moving forward and backwards along a path. Thus, somewhere along that path, acceleration must reverse. The code looks for points where the acceleration changes direction and counts that as one rep. After ten reps have been completed, Repman will buzz, and then sleep for 30 seconds (standard rest period for athletes). All variables related to rep detection will be reset. After 30 seconds, Repman will start waiting for the start button to be pressed, restarting the process. A Github link to the code can be found below:

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Wearable and Out In the World (Prototype) – Repman

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 19:54:21 +0000

by Jonathan Dyer, Anatol Liu and Kiran Matharu

When you hear the word “wearable”, what’s the first company you think of? Most likely your answer to the question is “Fitbit”, the $300 million dollar wearable company that just filed for an IPO. Fitbit has made their money by promising to improve your workout by tracking your heart rate and telling you how effective you’ve been. Though, how useful is information that someone would have to teach you how to use? Wearables should compliment and improve our current workout routines, not force us to adopt an entirely new behavior. That was our thinking when we designed “Repman”, a rep tracking wristband.

Repman is a wristband that uses accelerometers to count your reps as you go and vibrates when you’ve finished your set. There is no need to interact with an app or apple watch, just simply press the button and begin your workout.

The wristband works by collecting Y acceleration data from the Light Blue Bean. It first smooths the data using a smoothing filter found on the Arduino website. It then uses an algorithm to detect peaks in the data and counts each peak as a rep. It discards any rep that is too close too another, interpreting it as noise. The code and circuit diagram can be found here:

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Mobile Robot: Stalker & Prey

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 14:09:41 +0000

Group Members: Craig Morey & Jonathan Dyer

YouTube / Jonathan Dyer – via Iframely

For our first prototype we built a really cool light following robot. It uses photo resistors to sense how far it is from the light and moves to keep that distance. But once we started to think about how our robot would interact with other robots we realized that our robot is kind of obsessive about light, like what if another robot were just using light to find its way home… this robot would basically be a stalker.

This was really interesting to us so we programmed another robot to help us play out this scenario. we call the light following robot “stalker” and the light emitting robot “prey”. The prey robot is equipped with lights to simulate it trying to find its way home. It is also equipped with a distance sensor so that when it realizes its being followed it turns its lights out & ” freaks out” by spinning around. Once the light goes out, the stalker bot spins around as well and acts as if it were never following the other robot. Once the “prey” bot calms down and turns the light back on, the stalker bot resumes its chase.

On the stalker bot, light detection is accomplished through two voltage divider circuits with photoresistors attached to two of the 3pi’s analog-to-digital-conversion pins. On the prey bot, the ultrasonic distance sensor uses two of the 3pi’s digital I/O pins to generate pulses (TRIG) and read in the pulses that result (ECHO). The prey bot’s two LEDs are wired in parallel to a third digital I/O pin.

For those interested in creating their own “stalker” and “prey” robots or maybe just using their behavior in other projects, the github links to the C++ code for the 3pi bots can be found below:

Prey Code
Stalker Code

Here are circuit diagrams for each robot if you’d like to wire them yourself:

Prey:

Stalker:

For our final presentation, we decided to take the stalker and prey metaphor a little further by adding a social commentary about privacy in the age of social media. We attached an action figure like picture of Mark Zuckerberg to the prey bot and Edward Snowden to the stalker bot. The interaction between the two robots now symbolizes the relationship between Mark Zuckerber and Edward Snoden before Snowden revealed that he’d been part of an NSA project that used a fake Facebook server to intercept people’s information.

The most interesting part about this addition to the project was that once the robots were allowed to interact long enough, one quickly began to lose track of which robot was stalking and which was the prey. This observation elicited conversation about Snowden’s current role as a sort of vigilante exposing U.S. secrets about privacy infringements.

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One-in-one-out: “A Sensory So-Long”

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 04:08:08 +0000

Teaching children to say goodbye is frequent topic of discussion in parenting literature. One Harvard Medical School Professor, Susan Linn, says that, “[kids should know that] although no one can stop transitions, everyone has a chance to discover what you can do to contribute to the experience, to acknowledge, mark and take ownership of saying goodbye”. But really, what do we know about what children think about when they say goodbye? What would “taking ownership” of saying goodbye mean to them? When we first created our piece we wanted to provide an answer to this question. With the presentation of our piece, whether that’s the drawings, the handwriting, or even the children singing the songs, we wanted to convey how children use different senses as coping mechanisms to make saying goodbye a little easier. Though, once people started to interact with it they created their own meaning for it by making their own songs from the notes or even attempting to play the song backward. We realized that our experiences only highlighted how little adults understand about how children part ways. Children are all about the what; to them, the why and how really don’t matter. Our piece, “A Sensory So Long” (SSL), has become a commentary on how little is understood about how children part ways.

The main function of SSL lies within the two half circles of conductive tubing surrounding the octagonal case. The tubing has a linear resistance, which allows the user to create different resistances by grounding the tube at different locations. The Arduino reads the resistance and calculates the position of the ring along the tube. The Arduino then sends the position to a Macbook hidden under the case over a serial connection, using the Firmata firmware. The info is then interpreted using a Pure Data patch that maps the Arudino input to different points in the song. This allows the user to scrub forward and backward through the song.

All the technical specifications can be found here:

http://time.com/3902181/how-to-help-your-kids-say-goodbye/

YouTube / Rachel N – via Iframely

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“Active Exhaust” by Roush (2015)

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 02:30:05 +0000

The IoT is so exciting because of its potential to make our lives better in so many areas; everything from advertisement to agriculture can be improved tremendously if given the ability to connect the internet. IoT also offers the opportunity for one to control all the goods they use on a regular basis in ways they never have before. Roush’s Active Exhaust System allows users to turn the sound of their Mustang engine from a quiet purr to a throaty roar. The users can choose from several preset modes or create their own custom tunings by attaching their own Wi-fi dongle to the vehicles diagnostic port and using a smart phone app.

The app allows muscle car drivers to be more conscious of those around them by quieting their engine in a residential area for example. Though, it is interesting to consider whether, with this technology, neighborhoods will require muscle car drivers to quiet their famed and beloved engines. Then maybe the law requires that your engines be linked to a server that automatically quiets them in a residential area. Though this application seems common sense, at what point will regulation of what’s beloved and fun go to far When will the IoT give us too much control over the systems we use?

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“Vinduino” by Reinier Van der Lee Vineyard (2015)

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 02:06:06 +0000

With California going through its fourth consecutive year of drought, local farmers of even plants with the lowest water needs have been forced to cut back on their water consumption. Vineyard owner Reinier Van der Lee has created the Vinduino, a handheld Arduino device that takes sensor readings from Arduino based irrigation valves and water pressure sensors, demonstrating that he is surely up to the task.

Van der Lee’s goal with Vinduino was to improve upon commercial soil monitoring systems that rely upon only one sensor by instead using three to better understand how water is moving through the soil.

Vinduino demonstrates how Aruduino and the IoT are allowing consumers to not only control and view their data but to demand better accuracy then commercially available. After talking with a grad student that has worked with wearable companies and hearing her commentary on how questionable some of the information gathered by commercial wearables can be, products like the Vinduino demonstrate that the most revolutionary wearable products in the future may be those that allow users to adjust to their own amount of accuracy.

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“Portable Environment Monitor” by Radu Matisan (2015)

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 01:46:31 +0000

This project allows its users to effectively detect temperature, pressure, dust, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and three kinds of harmful radiation (alpha, beta, gamma); it even makes use of the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module (could it be any more perfect?). The most interesting aspect of this device is how it would be viewed depending on the context it was used. Say, for example, it was used in the third world; first world philanthropists would be able to use data to demonstrate how bad the situations are in the areas they are helping. Better yet, people from the third world would be empowered to collect data in their own areas and irrefutably show that they need help. In contrast, someone who acquires this device in the first world may be seen as overly cautious and obsessive. This project also demonstrates the potential of IoT to empower the masses to monitor whats around them. The project was created during the “Build Something that matters” 2015 Hackaday prize so I believe Motisan’s mission was exactly that; to empower individuals to be the change that they want to see.

Each of the portable environment monitors’ data is also streamed to a server where it can connect to the uRADMonitor network which “allows citizens around the world to collaborate on a vast, crowdsourced dataset of global air quality and radiation measurement”. This aspect of the project also allows users to demonstrate disparities throughout the country to emphasize the disparity in air quality in different parts of the world. If IoT devices continue to link our community to make change together, the possibilities are endless.

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