Since the introduction, I have yet again co-opted the smartphone’s capabilities in place of some stand alone sensors. This time its the camera. I replaced the chest cam with a smartphone. I have two reasons for doing so. First, the video files were too large to easily get off the Pi. I’m not running a desktop environment on the Pi and GitHub has a size limit on pushing files. Second, having the smartphone out-front makes it easier to store and access, as apposed to reaching into the backpack, unzipping, placing the phone in, and re-zipping.
I cut out a hard, flexible, piece of plastic from a container, sewed the top straps of the Fitly backpack to it. Then I have the front straps attached to the bottom of the phone holder with Velcro. The magnetic piece Fitly used were not strong enough to hold together with the weight of the phone. I fastened a smartphone clamp from one of those suction phone holders that go into cars. Its turned out to be pretty stable, after some modifications, when running. You can see in the picture the arm sleeve above the display. I using that to keep the cord running down to that from flying around. Running it down the back of the arm gives me complete range of motion without pulling the cord. Plus its more difficult for it to get snagged on something.
I wound up adding a camera feature to the android app so that I could toggle the video recording from the buttons on the arm display over the Bluetooth connection. This way I don’t have to keep taking the phone off to use its interface directly. And that one less cord running down the backpack.
I may play around with some object detection next.
Booman's Workshop 