Design mediate

A little late on the update but i got the design of the mediate finished a few weeks ago. Just forgot to post it.



The solidworks files of the mediate are available for download. Click here to download the mediate design and the Click here to download the mediate lit.
Also made a assembly of the design, you can download it here.

Wanted: Swimming Coaches

I'm looking for swimming coaches who are willing to give their point of view on the Zwemsor. If you are interested contact me.

Change

Like Barak Obama said, its time for change. Well there has been some changes with the group setup. Frank and Dennis aren't working on the Zwemsor anymore, they gave their end presentation last Friday. You can download the end presentation here (you need winrar to open it).

Dennis will return on the Zwemsor project on the beginning of February.

I will be continuing the project. The new Zwemsor design will be finished in the next few weeks. After that we will be able to test it inside the swimming pool again.

Durability test

Yesterday, before we went home, we started a durability test. We let the zwemsor run all night. It took 341 minutes and 55 seconds before the mediator stopped working.
The zwemsor itself however stopped sending after 418 minutes and 56 seconds.
This means that the zwemsor can buffer its data for 77 minutes until its buffer is full.


The mediator stopped because the WIFI died. The zwemsor died because it couldn't clear his buffer anymore since the mediator stopped communicating.

Downloads unavailable

We are moving our file server, so some files aren't available for download at the moment.

Swimming pool

Last Friday we went back to the swimming pool to test our test setup. We taped the mediator on a stick, which Dennis holds up above the swimming pool.


We made Frank our test subject. We taped the zwemsor on his back and threw him in the water.

A little video of some swimming action:


The data was streaming nicely until we needed to stop because of the tape was letting loos. See the pictures below.




After we taped the zwemsor back on Frank we had problems with the communication. After a lot of stress we found it was the battery of the zwemsor that was giving us problems. The battery power level was way to low to operate normaly.

Update

As stated in the previous post, Dennis and Frank had a stand on the nITe last week. They showed the zwemsor, current activities and further development.



We finished up the programming for the communication this week. The zwemsor now sends a 433 MHz signal to our mediator. The mediator sends the data using a 2.4GHz signal to the base station.

We started working on a little GUI to read the data directly from the zwemsor.

On this little GUI we can read the axes variables. The sliders below move left/right responding to the value of the axes.

We also started making a graph. In this graph we can read the data coming from the zwemsor. The graph streams live!
Screenshot:

Tomorrow we are going to the swimming pool to test our test setup.

A new design of the zwemsor is on his way!

Edit: Added some pictures

Update

A little late on the update but we made a lot of progress the last few weeks.

We had a problem with our sender.
The past week we were trying to get the two way communication between the spots to work.
What we encountered was that when both transmitters were active, the entire signal went haywire. To solve this problem we lead the 5v power through the High Voltage driver of the spot.

After doing this, the communication went down en we could not get it up again.

This created a lot of headaches for us, until today we discovered that the extra electronics from paralax on the transmitter created the problems.
So we bypassed the electronics en put the UART bus directly on to the LINX chip on the PCB.

And now everything works perfectly

The day after we tested it inside the aquarium we went into the swimming pool.

The range in the swimming pool wasn't as good as we had hoped. We had a range of 40 cm. However since the swimmer isn't that deep in the water, this should be more then enough. This still needs to be tested with a actual swimmer.

On the programming side Frank and Dennis made a sequence diagram.


You can find Frank and Dennis tomorrow and the day after tomorrow (15-16 October) ad nITe (stand 33b). Located ad the Martiniplaza in Groningen. For more information visit this website.

Download

We made some changes to our plan of action. Also the minutes of our meeting is available for download.

Underwater communication

We got the underwater communication working today. We placed the sunspot inside a box and dumped it in a aquarium. As shown above the sunspot sends a signal through the water to our receiver placed near the computer.

The next step is to test it inside the swimming pool.

This week

This week we finished the plan of action and made some changes to the planning.
I started looking for software the swim coaches are using at the moment. Most of the software available is software that uses camera's to analyze the swimmer (for example Swimwatch Race Analyzer).
The problem with this software is that the annalist needs to manually insert all the data. This is of course not ideal.

On the technical side we have been trying to get the UART communications to work. Our current progress with this, is that we have linked two SPOT's through a simple cable connection. When this works we can plug in the RF transceiver system and try to communicate through this.
The problem with the communication has been that the spot can send data to each other, but it get jarbled in the process. So if we send a constant string of numbers, there will be a few missing on the receiving end.

The plan is to try and find the issue next week and to try and solve it.

Plan of action available

The plan of action is available for download.

Planning

We made a planning for the next 8 weeks. You can download it here. You can also download the pdf version.

This week

This week we made a plan of action.
Dennis started modifying the sunspot and made a cable for the transmitter and receiver (first picture).

The transmitter and receiver that we are using can be plugged directly into the UART bus on
the sunSPOT and the receiver will send its signal strength as an analog signal to the sunSPOT.

The next step is to write the software for the SPOT's to get them to communicate.

Workspace

We are working in the Sun Microsystems Inspiration Lab.