Small Project

aFlabbyPanda

Hi,

I'm looking for someone who'd be willing to take on a small electronics project that I'm try to complete however I have zero experience in this area. Basically it involved building an interval timer for a gym. The budget is very small but I thought someone might like to take it on as a hobby or side project.

The pic gives you an idea of what we are trying to build but in basic terms we need to be able to select from a choice of rounds, minutes per round and then rest period. Here is a link to a very fancy version of what we need. We don't really care about timer display but maybe lights to indicate the current state would be handy if its not too much hassle. http://truepathtechnologies.com/blogs/?p=336



Thanks

longhalloween

Interesting, might take a look and see how this could be done.

spideog7

A microcontroller would do this handy enough and you could probably buy a development kit with everything you'd need already on it. An Arduino would be ideal if you're just starting off as they're easy to program, but there might be limitations to the timers in it. Something with a real time clock would be even better but probably getting more complicated, maybe a final year student could take it on as part of an FYP, seems a bit too simple to be a whole project though.

Chet T16

For anything under 30 mins I'd happily rely on the arduino timers, I'm fairly sure the error is a handful of seconds/day

longhalloween

Had a quick look at this today. It's a fairly simple to do, shouldn't cost more than 30 euro in parts if you could find an inexpensive case and you could probably power it from a 9V wall wart.

That would get you a basic small box with a switches to control the number of rounds, duration and rest periods, a go/stop switch and a small LCD to display the information. (this one for example : http://www.protostack.com/blog/2010/03/character-lcd-displays-part-1/)

You could then rig a speaker to beep at different tones to tell you whats going on while you're exercising.

After that, the skies the limit. More powerful speaker, larger display, big seven segment letters like the one in your link. Could even do some voice countdown or something!

aFlabbyPanda

Right so who wants to take it on! ;-)

longhalloween

BrianjG wrote: »

Right so who wants to take it on! ;-)

Whats the budget? :P