Blog 1 - Jay Langford

Blog 1 - Hello World

Bio

My name is Jay Langford, and I’m in my final year of college, studying Applied Computing with a specialisation in Cloud Computing. I’m new to the world of IoT with no previous experience, but I’m excited to learn about how connected devices can be used to solve problems and improve everyday life.

I’ve always been passionate about everything computers, and in my spare time I enjoy tinkering with tech, gaming, and exploring new ways to use technology. Outside of tech, I love music, I’m a big fan of football and enjoy running to stay active.


Ideas

IoT Plant Monitor
A device that monitors the soil moisture, temperature, and light levels for indoor plants.

A dashboard shows soil moisture percentages, current room temperature, and light levels, with recommendations for watering or moving the plant to a sunnier spot. It could also send notifications to a user’s phone when the plant needs water, more sunlight or anything extra.


Smart Exercise Band
A wearable device that monitors health metrics like heart rate, step count, and calories burned. It could use a light sensor like a PPG sensor to measure heart rate and calculates metrics over a certain period.

A frontend dashboard could show live heart rate, a step counter, and a calories-burned tracker. The dashboard could also provide insights like average heart rate during workouts and trends in certain data and be highly customisable.


What’s a Micro:bit

The Micro:bit is a small, programmable microcontroller designed to make learning about coding and electronics fun and accessible.

It’s hardware has an LED matrix for displaying text or patterns, two programmable buttons, motion sensors (accelerometer and compass), and Bluetooth for wireless communication.

Its software can be programmed using block-based coding, Python, or JavaScript.

The Micro:bit is most used in education like colleges and hobby projects, such as making games, creating wearable tech, or controlling IoT devices.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog 2 - HRV Demo

Image
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...
Read more

Week 1: HRV Review

Image
  What is it? Heart rate variability (HRV) is the measure of the variation between heartbeats. It is controlled by your autonomic nervous system (ANS). This system operates automatically and regulate process such as the heart rate and other bodily functions that are are not under conscious control. This system is broken into two branches the flight or fight (which preparing the body for action and stress) and the rest + digest (which promotes relaxation + recovery). HRV is influenced by the ability to smoothly shift between these two branches.  High HRV: Larger difference between successive heartbeats - Indicates a more flexible and adaptable autonomic nervous system.  Low HRV: Smaller differences between successive heartbeats - Indicates a less flexible autonomic nervous system.                                                ...
Read more

Lock In Day 1 (20/05/25)

Image
  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...
Read more