Sweetzpot, a Computational Quest towards Zen in the Art of Rowing

Allie Hopkins, TI and Sagar Sen, Research Scientist, Simula Research Laboratory

Have you ever wondered how it is to glide on water fading away into the sunset? Think about applying minimal effort in a rowing shell (boat) and letting the landscape pass by in your peripheral vision conjuring up sensations of freedom and mental clarity.

Rowing is the most efficient human powered geste on water that aims to achieve this sensation. Sweetzpot is a project that aims to aggregate high quality data from the physical world using sensors to give feedback to a rower about the elusive sensation of a perfect stroke.

Sweetzpot is a mobile application that aggregates data from several sources to guide a rower towards the perfect stroke:

Phone sensors: It uses the GPS for speed and detects surge using an accelerometer to compute stroke rate. The compass of the phone gives the heading of the boat.
Web services: The service http://openweathermap.org/ gives us data such as temperature and more importantly wind velocity with respect to the direction of the boat.
SensorTag sensors: The SimpleLink™ SensorTag, developed by Texas Instruments, is attached to the oar(s) of a rowing shell in a 3D printed encasing. The sensor provides raw data from its accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. The fusion of this data allows us to compute blade inclination, oar angle, at the start and finish of a stroke giving us the length of a stroke, and height of oar. We aim to compute the position of the oar in space at any given time through a sensor fusion algorithm.

The data garnered from all the sensors is presented in a mobile user interface to help a rower focus on his/her weak points which could be a short stroke or lack of balance to name a few. We hope that Sweetspot’s computation will give the rower the right feedback to attain perfection in the art of making a perfect stroke.

Sweetzpot Team (in alphabetical order)

Arne Laugstol, Havard K. Bjor, Marcus Noack, Sagar Sen, Tomas Ruiz Lopez, Waqas Moazzam, Yuanrui Li

Additional Resources:

Get started developing today by ordering your own SimpleLink SensorTag development kit (CC2650STK)
Get all the design files, BOM, Schematic and more with the SensorTag TI Design reference design
Share your projects with us on Twitter by tagging @TXInstruments and #SensorTag

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