Close
0%
0%

Stroller Tracker

Using an Arduino and your Smartphone to track how much your baby (and you) travelled.

Similar projects worth following
Using an Arduino with Bluetooth LE, a reed switch and a Smartphone App, we build a system that monitors the distances travelled with the baby stroller over an extended period of time. From a basic prototype, we work our way up to a power optimized system that we can just leave attached to the Stroller, lasting a long time one a single battery set.

After reading that a baby stroller (hope that's the correct, understandable term for the cart in which you push a baby/toddler around) will travel up to 6000km in it's lifetime, I figured that it would be great to track my toddlers stroller.

My goals are:

  1. Continuous monitoring of the distance travelled by the stroller
  2. Power efficient - my wife does most of the walking with my daughter and made it clear from the beginning that she won't change the battery before going on
  3. Smartphone & runkeeper integration - to amuse the grandparents, let's post the walks to runkeeper with our smartphones
  4. Long-term storage: Even when not using the smartphone to pull data, every movement should be logged and stored
  5. The system has to "reset" for a new activity to allow us to identify separate activities
After a lot of pondering and knowing nothing about the Hardware invovled, I settled for an Arduino Blend BLE Shield from readbearlab.com and a simple Reed (Magnet) switch to count the revolutions of the wheels - just like a normal bike computer.

  • 1 × Arduino Blend V1.0 Board An Arduino Leonardo Board with an integrated BLE circut from RedBearLab - good choice for beginners, not necessarily the best choice for this project
  • 1 × SD-Shield An Arduino SD/Datalogger shield like the one from adafruit - I used a replica
  • 1 × Reed Switch Really, any magnet/reed switch will do - I used one normally used for home security systems
  • 1 × Smartphone (iOS/Android A BLE (Bluetooth 4.0) capable smarthpone
  • 1 × 9V Battery with Arduino connector At least in the beginning as a basic powersource

  • 1
    Step 1

    Getting Started

    Starting the project, I followed the instructions at http://redbearlab.com/getting-started-blend to setup and test my development environment.

    Instead of using the provided app for download, I used the Chat App from here https://github.com/RedBearLab/Android to also test my Android development envrionment.

    Tests that I carried out at this point:

    • Pushbutton reaction (simpler to trigger than a reed switch)
    • LED blinking (of course :))
    • The Chat Sketch for the blend for basic integation between smartphone and arduino


  • 2
    Step 2

    Baby Steps

    To really understand what's going on, I build a basic tracker, without storage or Smartphone integration that just counted the trigger events of the reed switch.

    All we need for this is the Arduino board, a breadboard, a 10k resistor and the reed switch. Schematic are below:

    Wiring it this allows us to read the Pin 3 and w

View all instructions

Enjoy this project?

Share

Discussions

Similar Projects

Does this project spark your interest?

Become a member to follow this project and never miss any updates