To re-iterate the project intention:
The intention of this project is to develop a children’s soft good that serves as a grounding mechanism for young children who are overly anxious. Grounding mechanisms are used to manage anxiety by creating a movement or feeling to anchor someone back to the environment.
I am using a pulse-sensor and speaker for this project at the moment- I became interested in the tangible movement the speaker generates when electricity runs periodically through it and used it as the output for the pulse readings.
Overall, this checkpoint was a success in getting a basic program and functionality to work. I experienced a few problems reading the pulse sensor as the data is overly sensitive and am still working on making this more fluid. I am also experiencing a slight inconsistency with the beating- this is likely due to code troubles which will need a bit more time debugging.
Buggy heart-beat reading; using an LED
Buggy heart-beat reading; this one’s just fun
Next steps after cleaning the program and establishing something more robust would be to start housing the electronics and placing it inside a stuffed creature. I am unsure if I will be purchasing a stuffed animal at the time or creating my own- I’d like to first define where to place the pulse sensor that would be most effective.