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Blog 2 - HRV

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 Blog 2 - HRV Brendan Mayer This sensor uses a simple optical technique called PPG to track changes in blood volume as it moves through your body. It works by shining an LED light onto your skin—some of that light is absorbed, and some bounces back. A photodiode in the sensor picks up the reflected light and uses it to calculate your heart rate. By analysing how the light absorption changes over time, the sensor can measure your heart rate and variations in it. Heart Rate (HRV) Sensor Micro:Bit and MakeCode To take readings from the micro:bit, I connected it to a breadboard, which made it easier to hook up the heart rate sensor. Using block coding in MakeCode, I was able to collect the data and display it in different ways—either as an LED signal on the micro:bit itself or as a graph in the debugging menu. Challenges: The main challenge faced was getting an accurate reading from the sensor, since I drive a motorcycle my hands would always be cold and have less blood flow to my f...
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Blog 2 - HRV Demo

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Lab 2 - Simple Heartrate Sensor Demo For the second lab, our task was to explore the capabilities of the Micro-Bit platform by connecting an external sensor to the microcontroller through its' GPIO pins. Readings were aquired through a simple serial read script created in Microsoft Makecode. In this case, the external sensor measures heart rate / pulse by shining a bright green LED light into skin tissue and measuring the light reflected back. As the heart circulates blood around the body, a small variation in pressure occurs within blood vessels, arteries and capillaries. This pressure variation can absorb more or less light at various stages of the heartbeat and is the primary mechanism of the HRV sensor. By detecting fluctuations in light reflected back from the body, it is possible to get an acurate reading on our heartbeat. A similar mechanism of measuring bloodflow is used in other 'smart' technology such as smart watches, fitness bracelets and even in professional me...
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Lock In Day 1 (20/05/25)

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  Lock In day 1   Briefing We started the day with by getting the project briefing on what the end result should be. We decided to make a system where we could read in heart rates using a Microbit and then send that via the cloud to a website that would display real time data from the heart sensor.     Kanban planning Once everyone had a clear understanding of the briefing , we began defining a KanBan chart so that we could organise and allocate tasks. This consisted of Backlog, Doing, Done, Testing and Complete columns where we could quickly move tasks into different columns as they are completed.           Group allocation We began breaking down the steps required to complete this pipeline. This consisted of many different areas such as creating the cloud infrastructure on AWS, reading data on a micro bit and radio sending it to a raspberry pi so that it could be sent to the cloud infrastructure, creating a u...
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