Monitor your heartbeat with a webcam and a flashlight

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

After seeing some heart rate monitor apps for Android which use the camera and flashlight features of the phones, [Tyson] took on the challenge of coding this for himself. But he’s not using a smart phone, instead he grabbed a headlamp and webcam for his heat rate monitor.

To start out he recorded a test video with his smart phone to see what it looks like to cover both the flash LED and camera module with his thumb. The picture is mainly pink, but there’s quite obviously a color gradient that pulses with each gush of blood through his skin. The next task was to write some filtering software that could make use of this type of image coming from a webcam. He used C# to write a GUI which shows the live feed, as well as a scrolling graph of the processed data. He took several tries at it, we’ve embedded one of the earlier efforts after the break.

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Filed Under: Medical hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Arduino can program PIC too!

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is a wiring diagram that [Soranne] put together when developing a method of programming PIC microcontrollers using an Arduino board. You can see that he takes care of the 12V issue by connecting the Master Clear (MCLR) pin to an external source. This comes with one warning that the Arduino should always be reset just before making that connection.

He’s tested this with a 16F628 and is happy to report that he can successfully flash the program memory, but hasn’t implemented a way to write to the EEPROM as of yet. This should work for any of the 16F family of chips, but we’d bet this will be extended if some knowledgeable folks decide to lend a hand.

On the PC side of things [Soraane] has been working on a program to push code to the Arduino via the USB connection. He’s developing it in C# and even has a GUI worked up for the project. You can get your hands on the software in the second post of the thread linked above but you’ll have to be logged into the Arduino forum to see the download link.

We think the 12V issue is why we don’t see more roll-your-own programmers for PIC. But there are a few solutions out there like this ATmega8 version.

Filed Under: arduino hacks, Microcontrollers Tagged With: , , ,