BLOG# 5 - Beats Per Minute Nano

A Heart Rate Monitor using the Arduino Nano 33 IoT Board

Conclusions and Future Enhancements

This is my 5th and final blog post in a series of blog post for the Design Challenge: Design for A Cause 2021

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version 1.2

This is my final blog for this design challenge. This is a very simple design and implementation, demonstrating the use of the Arduino Nano 33 IoT MCU. I did learn quite a bit about this device and I have only scratched the surface of what can be done this this device. My design is now working and described in my previous Blog#4. in this blog I will share my conclusions of my experimentation using the "Nano 33 IoT" and my idea for other experiments that I would like to try out.

• Conclusions

  • I would *** to list my conclusions as to what I have gained from this Design Challenge.
    • This was my first experiment using an Arduino Board. I found it easy to use and found plenty of project that utilize the Arduino, both on element14 and the internet. I have experimented with other MCU's (Azure Sphere, NXP LPC55S69, Raspberry PI and DragonBoard) and I am pleased to be able to add the Arduino family to this list.
    • I found the Pulsesensor heart rate sensor extremely easy to implement. This is due to the excellent support the folks at the manufacture,  "World Famous Electronics llc" have on there website https://pulsesensor.com/.
      • There Library is full pf projects for the Arduino and other MCU's. I have used it to implement experiments with the sensor on 2 other MCU's (Azure Sphere,Raspberry PI ).
      • The Arduino library is intuitive and well explained with examples. The other MCU's not so much.

• • Did everything work as designed?
    • I was extremely lucky that everything in my design work out the first time. It did work as I had planned in my design.
    • Again, attributed to the project examples  on the manufactures website.
  • What were the biggest hurdles you had to overcome?
    • One of the biggest hurdles that I had to get pass in my research phase, was the use of interrupts on the Nano 33 IoT. The examples that used interrupts on the website did not seem to work, I was never able to figure out why. If anyone knows the answer why, please leave a brief comment.
    • Another hurdle to overcome, was learning yet another IDE for implementing code. I don't know why they call embedded programs SLETCHES. They seem more to me like C syntax scripts that are complied into an executable that is downloaded to the MCU. One point indicating a script is that the functions have to be defined before they are called similar to JavaScript. this caught me off guard for a moment.

• Future Enchantments

  • List some possible enhancements that can be added to make the system more useful.
  • The subjects that I did not have time to implement:

1. Using the Arduino IoT Cloud

• • • • • LINK to Project page

2. Experimenting with selected projects from the Element14 community:

• • • • • Blynk

        • IFTTT

        • Azure

3. Using MongoDB Atlas

• • • • • Connect to MongoDB Atlas with C
  • • • • Write the data from the Heart Sensor Project to the Database.

  • Other Enhancement Ideas

    • Experiment using Visual Studio Code and Platform IO instead of the Arduino IDE.
    • Find a way to debug code on the Arduino