July 03, 2014

A cheap Chip Tag for every Running club

Hello folks, 

   Today's post is about my entry to the Hackaday Prize, a competition that will take its winner to space :) . The objective of the competition is to make (and show the world how you did) projects that are in some way "connected": any kind of communication is valid. There is already a plenty of projects being showed there, and I think mine is a bit special: it is related to something that I love doing and will help me doing it better.
   I am talking about road Running; I have been running for three years now and I always feel frustrated when there is no chip-timing in the small races I participate, or even in trail or stairs races. Of course everyone can have a GPS-enable Cellphone or wrist-watch, but the first ones are not always comfortable to carry and the last one in not cheap enough for everyone to have it.
   So I came up with a hack solution (link here) that may revolutionize small running communities and clubs: An Arduino-sized device that reads RFID tags and communicates to any Android cellphone via Bluetooth. So every runner will only carry a small key-chain sized RFID tag and all the processing is done into the reader, that will finally send runner's time and name to an App to be developed on Android.


   The actual schematic for the project is seen above; I haven't started putting the hardware together yet because the parts are still being shipped to me, but have started the programming, that will probably be done into a Freescale FRDM-K64F board (features an ARM Cortex-M4 inside). 
   More details to come as I advance into the project. Get updated on my Google Plus: +Clovis Fritzen and my Twitter: @ClovisDuino. See you guys later, 

No comments:

Post a Comment