Tangerine Development

The Fall Ball is a project I created for my Ambient Computing class in the Spring of 2016. I hollowed-out a foam soccer ball and put a KL46Z board with a Bluetooth card inside it. I wrote a program that reads the board's accelerometer's freefall detection events and then broadcasts an alert over Bluetooth. In order to read the data, I wrote a program in Python to parse the signal coming in over the serial port.

For the second phase of my project, I built a server in Node.js that takes the instantaneous accelerometer data from the KL46Z and pushes it out to any client computer using web sockets. I installed it on a Raspberry Pi which is connected to Wifi in order to allow all computers on the network to see the ball's data in real time.

Here is an example of the output:

Here is a screenshot of the acceleration data from the board being plotted in real time!

If you want to know more specifics about how I got the code to work, check out my blog posts.