Sorry It has been a while since my last post, I have been a little busy with college finals, but now, I have time. So, what have I accomplished since my last check in? Let me tell you.
I have put together the basic design of my solution. In this solution, every athlete wears two sets of sensors and a microcontroller. There are the chest sensors and the head sensors. The chest sensors contain a heartbeat monitor and a couple of accelerometers. The head sensors are just a few accelerometers. These accelerometers can measure the magnitude of collisions, and can help to identify possible injuries. These sensors feed into a microcontroller with an RF receiver/transmitter. This can communicate with a box on the sidelines that will receive RF signals, and turn them into bluetooth so that it can communicate with a smartphone.
I have decided to use the sideline box in the interest of scalability. This more easily allows for longer range communication, as well as more players.
Now this is a pretty ambitious goal, so I have broken it into three segments. The first segment is the most critical to complete, and that is the sensors, microcontroller, and RF communication. This is the minimum viable solution. The second segment is adding in the bluetooth, and the third segment will be developing the smartphone application. I will be attempting to accomplish these three tasks in order and hopefully I will complete all of them.