Monitoring and Displaying Knee Movement using Android through Bluetooth
My main project is a machine that tracks the movement of the knee using knee sleeves and sensors. The data from it will be sent through Bluetooth and processed to tell the user whether or not the user is exercising correctly. This project will help users understand what exactly they are doing wrong when exercising.
Demo Night was a very interesting event, with more than 50 people coming to see us present our product. I really enjoyed the fact that many people came to learn more about what we did during the program and how we did those things. I hope that I will be able to do Bluestamp next year in person.
Third Milestone
For my third milestone, I planned on finishing the entirety of my project. I did this by first learning how to solder my circuitry to a perfboard so that I could inevitably attach it to the knee compression sleeve. Soldering essentially is using a hot iron and a solder wire to “glue” different parts of the circuit together. After soldering my Bluetooth module and my flex sensor, as well as attaching the gyro sensor to the Arduino, which I was able to make work by importing a library, I began to put all of the seperate parts togehter on the knee sleeve. I did that by attaching all my parts through sewing, and because my flex sensor had to preciesely bend based on the movement of the leg, I taped the flex sensor to the knee part of the knee sleeve. By doing this, I finished making my product. Finally, I programmed it to recieve the data and convert it into an angle that would be based off of the movement of the knee. Then, all data recieved from the Arduino was sent to the Android device through the Bluetooth module and MIT App Inventor. Using all of this allowed me to get close to finishing the product. My next step is to use the gyro data to give meaningful info to the user.
Second Milestone
My second milestone was getting the Bluetooth module to work with an android phone, as well as start learning how to use the accelerometer. The first thing that I did was getting the Bluetooth module to utilize the serial monitor so that AT commands could be used. AT Commands are commands that allow the user to interrogate with the Bluetooth module/HC-06. The next thing I did was develop an app using the MIT App Inventor App that would allow for an interface between the Bluetooth module and the phone. I was able to do this with the front-end and back-end development of the app, as well as the ability to utilize the Bluetooth module from the app itself. As of right now, I have started working with the accelerometer, and I hope to finish it so that I can start my project.
First Milestone
My first milestone was starting to work with the Arduino and its IDE. I learned about how to use the breadboard, the different ports on the Arduino, and how to send and accept data. I started up by lighting up a LED, and I used what I saw from the LED builtin coding example from Arduino to learn more about the language. I then went ahead and started working with a button. The button essentially uses a digital single which only sends 1s and 0s, or power on and power off. From there, I started with Analog ports and the different modules that could be plugged in, like the potentiometer, the photoresistor, and the flex sensor. Each of these is essentially resistors themselves, but they change the amount of voltage being sent based on some change. For instance, the potentiometer can be rotated so that a different voltage can be sent back to the Arduino, allowing for there to be a change in data. These are called variable resistors. I was able to get an understanding of these three sensors and see how to get the information back and shown through the Serial Monitor. My next goal is to start working with the Bluetooth module and sending flex sensor data from the knee to the app on the Android phone.
