This weekend I attended the first ever Hackaday Hackathon here in Austin, TX. It was a great and memorable event. I met lots of great people working on their own projects.

The hackathon was held at the Silicon Labs office, which was perfect for me, as I was trying to get my hands on a Silicon Labs heartrate monitor, ever since i met one of their reps at a TechShop meetup.

I scored two development boards, both of which I can use in the Pip-Boy design.

The first is the Sensor Puck. This thing is great. It is a Bluetooth LE device. Onboard it has a heart rate sensor, temperature sensor, and humidity sensor. The same heart rate sensor can also read UV index and ambient light if left exposed. As you can see in the image above, the board works out of the box. I can't say enough how much ready to use development boards like this help a non-programmer such as myself.

I have tried holding the monitor up to my wrist, with mixed results. It works sometimes if positioned directly over a vein, but not anywhere else on the arm. This chip was really designed more for reading a finger tip. Most wrist-mounted smartwatches typically use very powerful dual green LEDs to read your heart rate. So I may not be able to mount the sensor directly into the Pip-Boy armband. But it gets me a start on how these things works and if I can integrate the sensors.

/Edit: I noticed that the Si1147 chip does support external LEDs for the heart rate, so it sounds like I can boost the signal for use on the wrist.

The other development board I got was the EFM8 Busy Bee. This board comes with Space Invaders already installed. After a few minutes of playing around with that I only managed to get to level 4.

I may be able to use this dev board and chip to handle all the other stuff that the DragonBoard can't handle. Such as Analog input and LED PWM control. The board also has a five way joystick, which others have suggested I add to my project, It works well enough I may just try.

The best part is that Silicon Labs provides lots of support for their development boards.