Real-Time Action Tracking System(RATS)

Ryan Frazier and Brett Newlin

Brief Review What is RATS?

RATS is a system of sensors used to record statistical data and transmit this data wirelessly.

How can it be used? By attaching our sensor board to any object you will be able to record the

acceleration that object is feeling and you’ll be able to determine the rotation of that object.

Who is interested? Extreme Sports athletes (skateboarders, snowboarders, etc…) Extreme Sports Judges Extreme Sports fans

Related Work

RATS (Beta)– by Matt N. Nevitt, Kabir K. Shahani, Brandon S. Tengan, and Geoffrey R. Velasco from the Information School. Origin of our design Break-beam system used to determine height iPaq and an accelerometer attached to underside of skateboard.

Killer App – Edward Chi from the Palo Alto Research Center Sensor system used to determine clean hits in taekwondo. Use of piezoelectric sensors instead of accelerometers Wireless transmission of data to judges

Demo – Play with the Sensor board

June 11th, 1:00 pm in CSE 003 The user will be able to move the senor board freely and watch the data

packets appear on the screen. If Gaetano wants to he can skate around the lab in a chair and spin around to generate some interesting data.

After enough data has been completed we’ll be able to open up the data file in excel and view the data graphically and show you can determine what movements were made.

June 17th, Renton Matt Nevitt from the I-School has rented an indoor skateboard facility to

test his break-beam system on a professional sized halfpipe. Our RATS sensor board will also be there to test and acquire data for

Matt’s continued research.

Implementation - Schematic

Implementation - PCB

Implementation – Data Flow

ProgrammingBoard

3-axisaccelerometer Mica2Dot

MoteAtmel

ControllerSPI USART

300degreeGyro

Design Diagram of RATS Sensor Board

JTAG

Mica2DotMotePC Serial

RF

AD

C

Atmel Controller Programmed Via JTAG Gathers data from the Accelerometer

(digital transfer) Performs analog to digital conversion

of gyroscope data. Sends data to Mote via UART

Accelerometer Generates values at 280Hz ADC is on the chip so data being

sent to Atmel is digital.

Gyroscope Creates an analog out signal Self Test pins used for calibration

Motes Sender – gather data via UART and

Send over Radio Receiver – gather data via Radio and

Send over UART

Implementation

Completed Tasks PCBs designed and manufactured Prototype board soldered for testing TinyOS code completed

Still to come Atmega16L programming to gather data Front end

Data parser Mathematical computations Visualizer

Remaining Issues Getting the accelerometers in time for the demo.

Evaluation

Metrics Throughput – how much data can we send in real time? Power consumption – how long will our batteries last? Ruggedness – is this going to break once we put it on a skateboard? Precision and Accuracy – is the data useful? Usability – does the sensor inhibit the athlete’s performance?

Data Collected so far? Basic rotation and acceleration data at once every half second.

Conclusions It works and has the capability to gather data but the maximum amount

of data is unknown.

Future Work Software Capstone

There is an entire Embedded software capstone project available on our system

Try to maximize the amount of data sent in real time. Increase functionality of Motes, Atmel, accelerometer and

gyroscope. Front End software

Mathematical and Statistical computation Data visualizer

Hardware Evolution By using smaller IC packaging (ball grid array parts) we could make the

board even smaller. Better gyroscope (current one is limited at 300 degrees per second

which is too slow for snowboarding). Matt Nevitt from the I-School will most likely be using our sensor

board to continue his research.