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BodiHub

A Wearable, "Smart", Internet of Things Development Board That Learns

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I design and prototype wearable electronics. I've developed on all kinds of wearable and non-wearable development boards. Unlike prototyping for most projects, wearables are a different kind of beast due to the tough demands. You move a lot, sweat profusely, jump, kick, punch, and most times you'll smell bad. These conditions rip up soldered joints, jolt chips, crack boards and circuitry. Which leads to stalled product development because you're spending half your time trying to figure out what came loose, broke, or came off. To solve these problems, I created the Bodihub: A wearable "Smart" Internet of Things Development Board That Learns. It combines a wearable IoT module that has a front end neural network, with a cloud interface that does back end machine learning. This project is the continuing evolution of A Wearable IoT+ANN Dev Board for Body Sensing.

I've searched for a wearable Internet of Things development platform for my needs, and I didn't find what I wanted. Sure, there's a bunch of IoT wearable development boards out there. Some were all in one designs with gyroscopes and accelerometers for watches... but no analog ports. Some were Bluetooth, but not Wifi capable, and without that, WiFi mesh capable. One is sewable. I don't want to sew, and I had a lot of signal problems in sewable circuits. None had all in one cable connects, and I don't want to solder new wires directly to the board. And most of them don't use the Arduino eco-system, which in my opinion, is the most user friendly, community supported, hardware peripheral rich eco-system on the planet.

So, I made one. 

Here's a list of features that first version of the the board comes with.

  • The board is based on the ESP8266 SoC (System on a Chip) WiFi chip, which is 802.11 b/g/n compliant. The ESP8266 turned the world on its head when it first came out, since it was a programmable WiFi micro-controller all in one chip for a low price. We're currently using the ESP-12F, which has 36 kilobytes of SRAM, and 4MB of external flash ram for user program storage. It's a 32 bit microcontroller with an average speed of 80MHz, and can clock up to 160MHz. The greatest feature of the chip is it's compatible with the user-friendly Arduino development eco-system. This gives you access to a vast, worldwide community, an enormous software development library, and innumerable hardware peripherals, which makes this hard to beat.
  • Cable connects! There are dedicated connectors, with pins dedicated to I2C or SPI. The connector groupings come with their own power and ground pins, so you can centralize your power system to the board. To use this feature, just include the standard Arduino "Wire" library, which comes standard with the Arduino IDE and PlatformIO. The pins use eight pin ribbon cables, which you can easily find at your favorite electronics vendor.
  • Tired of the single, crappy 10 bit resolution ADC that the ESP8266 has? There's a dedicated ADC chip on board, which increases your ADC channels to four, and they're 12 bit in resolution! The pins also include their own power and ground pins as well. This gives you access to a vast array of analog sensors.
  • The on board power system regulates and charges your battery via USB. You can use any svelte, light, lithium ion battery you want. Save weight and size while increasing your juice! The 2 pin JST connector makes it easy to attach.
  • The board is a third the size of a credit card! That makes it small, light, and easy to attach to clothing. Or anything else you're using that needs a small form factor and space.
  • It attaches to your USB power supply or computer using a standard USB Micro B connector, you know, the kind that comes with your Android phone. And the on board USB to UART controller does the talking to the ESP chip.
  • It has a big power supply! Worried that you might be squeezing just a little too much juice with your program? Don't worry! With the on board regulator, you'll have more than enough current to take care of your power hungry needs.

What can you do with these capabilities? Here's a small list of projects being built with this development board.

  • Boxing gloves that talk to each other while you smash the bag or someone else's face, and tell you how much force you used.
  • Synchronized LED flow tools for fire and flow performers.
  • A mesh network logistics tracking system that uses augmented reality interfaces to see what the boards see and what they're talking about. You can see a demonstration of the concept that I did at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC hackathon in 2016.

    This is the first round, where the wifi cut out because it was clogged.
    https://techcrunch.com/video/crate-zero/...
Read more »

  • 1 × esp8266
  • 1 × esp32
  • 1 × cp2104 Interface and IO ICs / USB
  • 1 × ads1015 Evaluation, Demonstration Kits, Boards and Modules / Evaluation Kits, Boards and Modules
  • 1 × neuromem nm500

View all 7 components

  • Moving right along, and getting through the first round of the Hackaday Prize 2018

    Casual Cyborg09/06/2018 at 16:38 0 comments

    Whoah, I wasn't expecting that. Apparently, the BodiHub made it through the round of the Human Computer Interface Competition!


    Twenty Projects That Just Won the Human Computer Interface Challeng
    I was surprised, as I've been working on this thing for two years now, and been continuing on it through out this year and last year. I also noticed some peeps were miffed that I didn't have the required four build logs, and that there were three listed. Here are the previous nine build logs if you want.

    A Wearable, IoT+ANN Dev Board for Body Sensing

    I'm just too lazy to go and cut and paste all of the months and years previous work, especially all the work that occurred outside of competition in between 2017 and 2018, for the new entry, partly because I think that's wrong to do, but I also don't think I should discount my work that was happening outside of competitions.

    I actually had a discussion with one of the Hackaday people, who was trying to convince me to enter my work into the competition, and I almost didn't enter, because he stated that I had to start a whole new project page for it - it has to do with getting enough likes to get some seed money. I wasn't keen on that idea, and I felt like entering would've been a waste of my time, as I wasn't in the mood to just start a whole new project page just to compete. When you've spent almost a year and a half, on a project page building a following, you can see why it doesn't make sense to make a whole new project page just for the competition.

    The reason is my previous project page is also a market test page, to see how many people would be interested in the project. If there's enough people interested in it, it justifies me to go ahead and do a production run of these development modules. If not, I can't justify spending the money to do it. Hardware is hard for a reason, and it costs money to bring a product out. It's not like software. 

    Now, why am I taking that approach?

    I learned some really really harsh lessons from this project, from my defunct startup company,

    SynthaSense Suit: Control Stuff With Your Muscles

    When you blow your life savings and three to four years of your life on something the market isn't really interested in, that's a harsh ass lesson to stomach. I got spanked pretty hard. And I always, ALWAYS learn my lessons.


    Anyway, it'll be up to the judges to decide if the large amount of work I've done before this competition previously should or shouldn't be allowed to qualify as part of the build. Which I personally think is a disservice, because this kind of project takes way way longer than just the time during the competition to do. Many of us do work full time jobs.

    Moving on, I've been working steadily on the board, but have also been working to get a startup company on a firm footing, so things have slowed down a bit. This capital infusion should help me get the 3rd iteration of the boards done though. Pictured below, is iteration 2, thanks to Oshpark. You can see it next to the first iteration 1, which is to the right.


    Stay tuned!

  • Testing the BodiHub's Interconnectibility

    Casual Cyborg04/18/2018 at 21:12 0 comments


    Cyborg's gonna cyborg. It was nice out today, so I went to do a quick concept photo shoot with the BodiHub system. You can see how I've connected a body sensing module, my SEMG unit, with the BodiHub.

    I'm in the middle of cleaning up version 3 of the PCB board. With some advice from the HacDC folks, and some finagling, I've got the USB micro B connector replaced. Oh, and if anyone out there wants a reference on those freaking things, here. I can't believe how much time I lost just hacking around it and making do to get it to work.

    We're going to send out the revised board tomorrow to fab with @oshpark . I also learned of another technique to make the boards even smaller and compact, using stencils, so I'll be sending out for stencils with oshstencils. In the mean time, today I tested out the interconnecting feature of the board, using one of my old SEMG modules from my defunct startup company. You can read more about those modules here at Control Stuff With Your Muscles.

    The idea with this is to test out the inter-connectors, and the functionality. Here's a preliminary setup of the concept.

    The SEMG isn't the only module that can hookup cleanly to the BodiHub. IMU sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes can also hook up in clean configurations to it. And then there's the analog ports! I have flex sensors that I want to use to balance against the IMU sensors for a much better body kinetic measurement system. They're all analog - hence the reason I wanted dedicated ADC units, not the crappy one that comes with the ESP8266 or ESP32 - so I'll have a preliminary concept picture out on how those will be set up pretty soon.

    In the meantime, I've replaced the reversed USB Micro B port <Damn You Hirose! Damn You!>, and added a whole bunch of improvements which should prove valuable to hackers, like extra pins for more ports in case something gets hung up, etc. I was going to open up the REGIN of the CP2104 to make for a dual redundant power supply, but given that it's not recommended just in case one voltage varies just enough with another, I went against it. I do have a nice 600mA power supply on there, and I'm looking to juice that higher to 800 or 900mA, which should take care of most power hungry needs AND the antenna transmission system.

    Stay tuned, and keep hacking!

  • Assembling the Board Pt 3: Finding ESP8266 tips you have to hunt really hard for.

    Casual Cyborg04/05/2018 at 17:55 0 comments

    It's alive! It took me a while to find out that any ESP8266 you work with, has to have at least 300mA in juice. And that 3.3V power supply coming off of your USB to UART that you're using to communicate and power your ESP8266? Ain't gonna cut it. Most USB to UARTS have at most 18.5 mA. It wasn't until I soldered on the 3.3V regulator which has a minimum of 600mA that the board started working properly.

    Before that, I was getting all kinds of weird reboot errors, strange memory address registers on the serial terminal, and strange blinking lights off the board itself. It was weird too. I could upload and flash the memory, and I'd get hardware puke in return. After many, many hours looking it up in forums, blog sites, and... goddamn, I think I'm also going to write an FAQ on the ESP8266 to save other people this kind of headache. Anyway, after all that, it was this one forum post in sticksville internet, that some dude said he never runs the ESP8266 without some kind of external power source that IS NOT from the USB to UART.

    That's when I had that "Ah, F--K ME!" moment.

    Now? It runs smooth as butter! Check it out!

    This is the board with the typical blinky light "hello world!" program.

    And this is the board talking to the web via WiFi! Up next! More hardware revisions, cost cutting, do you really need that on the board, and some concept photography! Because I always need an excuse to put on a lycra jumpsuit. OK, OK, it's to demo how we're going to mount the bodihub onto the body, where the sensor channels are, and what this thing can do. Plus, hey, it's always fun to feel like you're a high tech superhero from a comic book...


    HADOUKEN!


  • Assembling the Board Part 2: If at First You Don't Succeed...

    Casual Cyborg03/30/2018 at 17:43 0 comments

    For  the previous blog entry, read Assembling the Board Part 1: Fried Board Recipes.

    So I managed to finish assembling the rest of the subsystems of the board.

    After, I think 3 more attempts to solder on the QFN package, and finding that the voltages of the CP2104 weren't, well, doing what they're supposed to be doing, eg. I have a VBUS of 4.75 V, and there "should" be a VOUT of 3.45V, only to see 1.6 Volts coming out, I decided, OK, you know what? Let's just get the other subsystems that I know should be working, working. which means the ESP8266 and its supporting electronics, the redundant power supply and battery charging system, and the ADC system. None of those have strange soldering issues. I'm not sure if while doing the hot air method if I basically shorted the CP2104 and did something odd to it, or what.

    So, to see if I could get some answers, I headed over yesterday to HacDC, where I met one Julia Longtin, who placed in the 2014 hackaday quarterfinals with her Microwave Aluminum Printing Technology.

    Julia pointed out that I was hitting a problem with temperature differentials in the QFN package, the solder, and the board itself. The board needed to be at a higher temperature for the solder and the chip to adhere solidly. Which meant heating the board, either with a soldering hot plate, an electric skillet, or with a freaking flood light?!!

    Given how new I am to hand done SMD/SMT soldering, Julia gave me a crash course in using a flood light that we salvaged from HacDC's extensive, um, "storage" facility, aka place where a lot of stuff ends up. Anyone need an analog oscilloscope? They've got tons to give! Shoot, I have two to give...

    So, the next thing I need to do is to get a hot plate, and some ramen. Because SMD soldering gets me pretty hungry. Till then, I have to make do with the board like this:

    The other problem I ran into is I specced out the incorrect USB micro B connector! It's times like these where I wish I was in Shenzhen. Instead of hunting through an online catalog at Mouser.com, reading confusing datasheets where the mechanical designs aren't always up front, I'd much rather be able to go out the door, go to a shop, and check out what they've got, touch em, feel em, take a look and get a good idea of what I want. This whole catalog and pray method isn't the best way to prototype.

    Up next, more adventures in SMD/SMT soldering, and creating some of the first use cases! Stay tuned!

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bokker11 wrote 04/06/2018 at 13:51 point

 It wasn't until I soldered on the 3.3V regulator which has a minimum of 600mA that the board started working properly.  What kind of regulator are you using ? 

  Are you sure? yes | no

Casual Cyborg wrote 04/11/2018 at 20:51 point

Hey dude!

Any 3.3V dedicated regulator that outputs at least 300mA should do the trick. Now, I want to attach more things to the bodihub, so obviously being able to power them is important. For starters, I have 600mA minimum, which means mo juice fo mo stuff...

  Are you sure? yes | no

Bhavesh Kakwani wrote 03/29/2018 at 20:59 point

Really cool! I am wondering: is the plan for this board to have an analog front end (pre-amp, filters)? A lot of body signals, such as EMG, have a very low signal amplitude so I'm wondering if the idea is to include it on this board or if that's out of the scope of this project.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Casual Cyborg wrote 03/29/2018 at 21:08 point

I did think about incorporating my wearable SEMG suit design, see https://hackaday.io/project/4716-synthasense-suit-control-stuff-with-your-muscles, (it got profiled on hackaday back in 2015 - https://hackaday.com/2015/03/23/control-stuff-with-your-muscles/, but, here's the trick. You need at the least, shielded cable, and ground that mo-fo, because the noise is ridiculous. So for now, that idea is out of the scope, and it's more for general purpose ADC uses. I think if I decided to go back to attaching my SEMG tech to the  BodiHub, I actually would make a custom module to put it as close as possible to the SEMG electrode points, have an on board, simple processor like an atmel, and pipe the information via I2C to the central hub. Or make a dedicated ADC hub to be located next to the SEMG, and pipe that information to the hub as digital. SEMG is real tricky when it comes to noise. Same with EEG.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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