A cheap Chip Tag for every Running club

Hello folks, 

   Today's post is about my entry to the Hackaday Prize, a competition that will take its winner to space :) . The objective of the competition is to make (and show the world how you did) projects that are in some way "connected": any kind of communication is valid. There is already a plenty of projects being showed there, and I think mine is a bit special: it is related to something that I love doing and will help me doing it better.

   I am talking about road Running; I have been running for three years now and I always feel frustrated when there is no chip-timing in the small races I participate, or even in trail or stairs races. Of course everyone can have a GPS-enable Cellphone or wrist-watch, but the first ones are not always comfortable to carry and the last one in not cheap enough for everyone to have it.

   So I came up with a hack solution (link here) that may revolutionize small running communities and clubs: An Arduino-sized device that reads RFID tags and communicates to any Android cellphone via Bluetooth. So every runner will only carry a small key-chain sized RFID tag and all the processing is done into the reader, that will finally send runner's time and name to an App to be developed on Android.

   The actual schematic for the project is seen above; I haven't started putting the hardware together yet because the parts are still being shipped to me, but have started the programming, that will probably be done into a Freescale FRDM-K64F board (features an ARM Cortex-M4 inside). 

   More details to come as I advance into the project. Get updated on my Google Plus: +Clovis Fritzen and my Twitter: @ClovisDuino. See you guys later, 

My Brand-new Freescale Freedom board!

Hello everyone,

  Some weeks ago I entered a contest from Freescale Semiconductor, the Montain Mondays: the contest would give away 20 development boards for the ARM Cortex-M4 technology, every monday for five weeks (a total of 100 boards). The board were the FRDM-K64F , Ethernet enabled, onboard SD Card reader and Arduino form-factor. All I had to do is to suggest a possible application for the board. 

   The the board come to me by mail and I started to look around the internet for information about it: surprisingly there are tons of documentation and libraries, including some for most of the Arduino-compatible sensors and actuators. There is even  an online IDE/compiler for the ARM boards: mBed (which is fully compatible with my specific model of board). 

the tiny nice FRDM-K64F from Freescale

   The IDE has a nice design, is light and includes libraries that can be imported into your project almost automatically: if you compile your design without some specific (and necessary) library, the IDE will give you a warning, then you are driven to a search too where there is going to be a list of all "alike" libraries; just click on "import" and you are good to go!. 

   This board can be programmer through a system called "Open SDA", which allows you to simply drag your compiled program into a "disk", which is really the interface of the ARM microcontroller with your computer. It simplifies the process of flashing your device and makes it look nice and fast.

   I would like to thank +Freescale for sending me this board; And also would like to tell you guys that I have been working on a temperature and humidity Data-logger inside this board, which will also be Ethernet capable: and hopefully will become a fully functional meteorological station; More news and updates to come in the next few days.