HRM and/or cycle computer with Bluetooth

Simon Brooke said:

I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about near-real-time
telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook everything together
would be a commodity personal area network, e.g. Bluetooth. Does anyone
know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which will talk Bluetooth?

You'd better be prepared to change or charge the batteries frequently.
Bluetooth uses a heck of a lot more power than the simple clicky
transmitters.

Simon Brooke said:

I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about near-real-time
telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook everything together
would be a commodity personal area network, e.g. Bluetooth. Does anyone
know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which will talk Bluetooth?

I've been toying with this idea, but intending to use wired cadence and
wheel rotation sensors together with a Polar HRM chest strap (Polar do a
receiver module for these), which can then be connected up to a
microcontroller, possibly also with GPS input. The on-bike display would
be a multi-line dot matrix LCD, with facility to upload information to a
laptop.

I'm not a fan of wireless for its own sake, it's batteries and
reliability problems that can be avoided for a little time setting up
cables.

If you were intending using bluetooth because you could then use a
PDA/smartphone for the data collection and/or UI, then my approach would
still work, using a small micro to collect and process the relevant data
before multiplexing it onto a single link to the PDA/smartphone (also
useful as some of these limit the number of simultaneous bluetooth
connections they can hold open, which would prohibit the use of all of
your sensors).

Matt

in message <[email hidden]>, POHB

(') said:

Simon Brooke said:

I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about
near-real-time telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook
everything together would be a commodity personal area network, e.g.
Bluetooth. Does anyone know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which
will talk Bluetooth?

You'd better be prepared to change or charge the batteries frequently.
Bluetooth uses a heck of a lot more power than the simple clicky
transmitters.

Oh, sure.

It seems that someone is already experimenting with the concept:
http://www.alivetec.com/pdf/sports_handout.pdf
http://www.frwd.fi/

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

Do not sail on uphill water.
- Bill Lee

in message <[email hidden]>, Matthew Haigh

(') said:

Simon Brooke said:

I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about
near-real-time telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook
everything together would be a commodity personal area network, e.g.
Bluetooth. Does anyone know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which
will talk Bluetooth?

I've been toying with this idea, but intending to use wired cadence and
wheel rotation sensors together with a Polar HRM chest strap (Polar do a
receiver module for these), which can then be connected up to a
microcontroller, possibly also with GPS input. The on-bike display would
be a multi-line dot matrix LCD, with facility to upload information to a
laptop.

I'm not a fan of wireless for its own sake, it's batteries and
reliability problems that can be avoided for a little time setting up
cables.

If you were intending using bluetooth because you could then use a
PDA/smartphone for the data collection and/or UI, then my approach would
still work, using a small micro to collect and process the relevant data
before multiplexing it onto a single link to the PDA/smartphone (also
useful as some of these limit the number of simultaneous bluetooth
connections they can hold open, which would prohibit the use of all of
your sensors).

I'm currently (for work) building software for field data loggers which use
the HP iPAQ 6515 device - a combined PDA/mobile phone thing with built in
GPS; Nokia make similar devices (3660 and 6630 models, I think, possibly
others), and probably other manufacturers do as well. One of the things I
organise every year is a long distance mountainbike/road bike event (see
http://www.7-24.org.uk/). What I'm thinking about is providing
near-real-time tracking software for the teams, and for that all I really
need is the GPS data from the device itself. However, it does seem that if
one is going to do this sort of thing it ought to have an open interface
to allow other variables to be collected and logged, such as heart rate,
cadence, wheel speed and so on.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; may contain traces of nuts, bolts or washers.

"Simon Brooke" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

I'm messing vaguely in my head at present with ideas about near-real-time
telemetrics for cycling. The simplest way to hook everything together
would be a commodity personal area network, e.g. Bluetooth. Does anyone
know of HRM, speed and cadence transponders which will talk Bluetooth?

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; All in all you're just another hick in the mall
-- Drink C'lloid

Simon,

I don't think you get far with actual products as yet (but I'm very
interested if I'm wrong!), but take a look at the
Body Area Network (BAN) stuff that's coming out of ubiquitous computing....

Cheers,
Graham

Have a look at sports-tracker.comsports-tracker.comOpen ↗. You can use a GPS enabled Nokia phone and Polar bluetooth HR monitor/belt (which they sell on the web site) and you pretty much have a great sports training computer. All you need is a bluetooth cadence.