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Now that's it's over... — Parallax Forums

Now that's it's over...

knikulaknikula Posts: 26
edited 2013-08-07 07:41 in Announcements
Project name: Heart Rate Controlled Treadmill

Whew, I have to say I'm glad this contest is over...

I did learn quite a lot during the development of this project, and the gentle pressure of the deadline certainly did "nudge" me to continue to learn.
I learned facebook and youtube have to be off-limits to accomplish anything worthwhile, and the greatest progress usually occurs at 1am...

I basically submitted two projects that accomplished the same thing, one with an Android tablet as an interface via bluetooth, and one with a keyboard/VGA setup that provided the interface. The first time I connected the Android version to the treadmill was around 10pm on July 31st....

I knew nothing about Android developing when I started this, (and armed with a Intro course in Java that I took 12 years ago) and not much about the Propeller either. Now I know just slightly more about each...Took me quite awhile to figure out how to just get Eclipse to work, and what a logcat was...xda develpers, stack overflow, and Parallax tutorials really saved the day...

Now I need a new project to avoid losing my newfound knowledge...


But I did pick up a lot of valuable experience with both development platforms (Eclipse and Propeller Tool)...

I was shooting the submitted videos a few hours before the deadline, so there was no editing at all...naturally, my camera SD card became full as I took the first picture, and the camera batteries
went dead near the tail end of the first video. No swearing involved, but a few "that's par for the course..." type comments...

Oh, and while raising the angle of the treadmill platform, a wire was caught in the mechanism , and tripped a circuit breaker, leaving me in the dark...
Yeah, it's all good...

I was still writing code, making things pretty, on July 31st....good thing I'm unemployed...

I'm sure I'm the only guy who was rushing to beat the deadline.....

here are the 3 unedited videos...

http://youtu.be/P2S8BCWwsFQ
http://youtu.be/vit_h--K7XQ
http://youtu.be/LQYE8CSgCG8

Regards,

Ken

Comments

  • Invent-O-DocInvent-O-Doc Posts: 768
    edited 2013-08-07 07:41
    Awesome! Those control loops can be tricky. The fact you did a full propeller and prop/android version is really nice.
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