At the very bottom of the app are three hall effect sensors and a magnet stuck on the wheel. From this connection it’s possible to establish when and how often a rotation happens, and so the speed of the user running/walking on the wheel.
The mechanism is very simple: a magnet gives an input each time that passes by a hall effect sensor. However, a single sensor wouldn’t be enough, a certain point of the wheel might pass in front of it without it being necessary to do a complete rotation, the wheel might oscillate for example. Therefore, I posed three sensors
(A, B, C) next to each other at the base of the wheel, as illustrated below.
In this way I will count a rotation only when the magnet passes A-B clockwise.
C, posed between A and B will simply stop the timer.
Here it’s the Arduino code.
The values to take in consideration are reported by two timers:
TA = takes time of each rotation, counts A-B clockwise
TB = takes the overall time. It counts the time from the beginning of the interaction = 0 + the first time value imported by TA, till the end of the interaction = 10 seconds after the last input received by TA. It will be assumed that if there have been no rotations for 10 seconds the user has concluded its performance.
Process:
1 – Time is taken for each wheel rotation and multiplying that by the wheel circumference, speed is obtained.
2 – As soon as the performance finishes the times of each rotation are added up, giving the total performance time.
3 – Users are asked to enter their name and weight.
4 – Weight entered replaces the default weight of 60kg (see calculations) and calories are recalculated.
5 – New data are placed in the leaderboard.
