in message <
[email protected]>, Matthew Haigh
('
[email protected]') wrote:
> Simon Brooke wrote:
>> I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about
>> near-real-time telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook
>> everything together would be a commodity personal area network, e.g.
>> Bluetooth. Does anyone know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which
>> will talk Bluetooth?
>
> I've been toying with this idea, but intending to use wired cadence and
> wheel rotation sensors together with a Polar HRM chest strap (Polar do a
> receiver module for these), which can then be connected up to a
> microcontroller, possibly also with GPS input. The on-bike display would
> be a multi-line dot matrix LCD, with facility to upload information to a
> laptop.
>
> I'm not a fan of wireless for its own sake, it's batteries and
> reliability problems that can be avoided for a little time setting up
> cables.
>
> If you were intending using bluetooth because you could then use a
> PDA/smartphone for the data collection and/or UI, then my approach would
> still work, using a small micro to collect and process the relevant data
> before multiplexing it onto a single link to the PDA/smartphone (also
> useful as some of these limit the number of simultaneous bluetooth
> connections they can hold open, which would prohibit the use of all of
> your sensors).
I'm currently (for work) building software for field data loggers which use
the HP iPAQ 6515 device - a combined PDA/mobile phone thing with built in
GPS; Nokia make similar devices (3660 and 6630 models, I think, possibly
others), and probably other manufacturers do as well. One of the things I
organise every year is a long distance mountainbike/road bike event (see
http://www.7-24.org.uk/). What I'm thinking about is providing
near-real-time tracking software for the teams, and for that all I really
need is the GPS data from the device itself. However, it does seem that if
one is going to do this sort of thing it ought to have an open interface
to allow other variables to be collected and logged, such as heart rate,
cadence, wheel speed and so on.
--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke)
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; may contain traces of nuts, bolts or washers.
