Hello all. Its been a little while since I last posted, but I was waiting for a major milestone; however, I have come to realize that this project will be made up of many smaller milestones. Needless to say, this update is going to cover a lot.

I would like to give a quick intro again to my angle approaching this competition. I have designed everything in this competition with three things in mind: is it cheap, is it easy to build, would an athlete actually wear it. Having been a broke athlete in college, who is self taught in electronics and programming, I feel that I am very qualified to tackle these goals, and I think that so far, I have done as much as I can to complete these goals.

Now lets look at what I've done.

First: Design

I have finished designing the housing for the main wearable unit, but unfortunately all of the 3d printers at Purdue University are currently out of order or closed (yes, all of them), so I have been unable to print it. This housing is meant to hold the battery, arduino, xbee module, heart rate monitor, and an accelerometer. The whole thing is then worn on the back like a small backpack. For reference this is 5.75 inches tall, and 3.5 inches wide.

Second: Hardware

So, I am currently finalizing my decisions for hardware. Currently I am using an arduino board with an xbee shield for the main wearable unit. This attaches to a heartrate monitor that was provided. There will also be two accelerometers. One will be placed in a headband to be worn on the head, while the other will be placed in the main housing.

The second module of this project was designed with team sports in mind. While I liked the idea of putting a bluetooth module in the wearable, I wanted a coach to be able to see data from the whole team and not just one player. This is why I am using xbees, because it allows a large number of modules to operate on the same network, so large teams can function without issue. This requires one module on the side that receives all of the data from the network, and passes it to the smartphone over bluetooth. This is done with a wireless shield and a bluetooth serial module.

Finally: Software

This project would be nothing without supporting software. I have posted all of my code for this project in the following two github repositories:

https://github.com/TheAustinSeven/RealTimeCoachapp

https://github.com/TheAustinSeven/RealTimeCoachArduinoCode

Note: I am currently very far behind on posting my code to these repositories, so expect huge updates in the coming weeks.

Sorry that I have posted so little about this, I will now be posting about twice every week until I am finished, which I currently project to be the end of February, and then I will post as I begin to test the final product.