Guided Seas

Introduction

"What were the needs or pain points that you attended to and identified when you were solving problems faced by the Contest Masters?"

After a conversation with Marc Chiang, one of the contest organizers who himself had a visual impairment, I noticed some challenges his disability presented him with as regards to swimming. Due to his visual impairment, he relied on the thick lines in the pool to guide his swimming, limiting his ability to swim only during daylight hours. His desire to swim in the open sea posed a unique challenge, as there were no lines to follow.

To address this issue, the most common solution involved having guides swim alongside him, providing auditory cues for direction or being physically tethered to someone with whom he would swim simultaneously.

As a result of this, I came up with the idea "Guided Seas". Guided Seas revolutionizes the experience for visually impaired swimmers by utilizing a specially designed swimming cap equipped with vibration motors positioned at its four corners. The motor that is vibrating indicates the direction to swim to. These motors can be controlled remotely via a mobile phone by the person guiding the swimmer. What makes this innovation particularly unique is that it eliminates the need for a professional guide to be present in the water. Instead, any willing individual can take on the role of a guide.

This entry is under the swimming theme of the build-together inclusive challenge.

Setting up the Notecard (continue later)

To use the notecard, we will need to have a project on notehub. Go to the notehub website and follow the steps below

• Navigate to the Notehub Projects Dashboard.
• Click on Create Project and type in your project's name in the form that pops up.

• Take note of your project UID, because notehub will use it to associate your notecard to the project we created.

Setup the Notecard

The Notecarrier-A includes two u.FL cables for cellular and GPS with one side connected to the Notecarrier and one side free.

Remove the screw from the mounting receptacle on the Notecarrier and rotate the U.FL cables away from the M.2 socket.

Place the Notecard into the M.2 slot on the Notecarrier. Once inserted, press gently until the Notecard is inserted and the screw receptacle hole is completely visible.

Re-insert the screw into the mounting receptacle and tighten it to secure the Notecard to the Notecarrier. Be sure to not overtighten the screw

Secure the free end of the u.FL cable connected to the socket labelled MAIN on the Notecarrier to the MAIN socket on the Notecard.

Secure the free end of the u.FL cable connected to the socket labelled GPS on the Notecarrier to the GPS socket on the Notecard.

Now connect the note carrier via USB to your computer. and then go to blues.io, in the developers drop-down at the top of the screen click developers hub

when the page has loaded, the new page should have a terminal icon at the right edge of the screen

Click on it and select USB note card,

A browser prompt will appear asking for permission to connect to a USB Serial device

If you're on a Mac, select either Notecard (cu.usbmodemNOTE1) or Notecard (tty.usbmodemNOTE1).

On Windows, the option will show up as USB Serial Device (COMx).

On Linux the option will show up as Notecard (ttyACM0).

{"req":"hub.set", "product":"com.your-company.your-name:your_product"}

Copy and paste the following Notecard request, making sure to replace com.your-company.your-name:your_product with the ProductUID you got when you created a project on notehub. This will help the notecard know where to send data. You should get an empty JSON as a response.

Use the request below to synchronize the notecard to notehub

{"req":"hub.sync"}

Once a sync has started, you can optionally check on the state of the sync with a hub.sync.status request.

{"req":"hub.sync.status"}

You can now go back to notehub under the project we created earlier and you should see that a device has been added to your project.

Next, we need to get our project API keys, click on settings on the left side of the screen and scroll down to programmatic API keys

copy the project Client ID and Client secret and keep it somewhere we will use it later when making the mobile application.

The Mobile Application

The mobile app works by using blue wireless API to update a note.dbs file on notehub which automatically synchronizes with our note card. The Notehub is a Blues Wireless cloud service for viewing event data from Notecard devices and securely routing said data to third-party cloud applications.

I will be using Kodular to create the Android application. Kodular is a low-code Android application development platform, which allows it users to create Android applications using blocks. There would be two screens in the app, screen 1 will serve as the sign-in page while screen 2 will be where the main action is will be happening.

Screen 1
In the first screen, you sign in using your API keys. You only have to do this once. The next time you open the app, it takes you straight to the next screen.

input your credentials and click sign in, if the credentials are valid you will be moved to the next screen.

Screen 2

In this screen you have, we have a button that when pressed updates a notefile with the direction they are pointing to.