Archive for February, 2008
More tests with the Nike+iPod protocol
A lot of information about this device online is misleading. When I first heard about this, the site I was reading claimed the transmitter didn’t have a battery, and used the energy from the foot impact to power the burst transmission of the device’s ID. This is what got me excited about the device in the first place: that it was so simple.
Other places I’ve read say there is an accelerometer inside. While not entirely inaccurate, it is again slightly misleading. It does not have an accelerometer the same way a Wii controller does. It has a piezoelectric sensor. (See SparkFun’s Nike+iPod Dissection page)
I am not entirely confident that I know the capabilities of piezoelectric sensors, but if I am understanding correctly, they are primarily used to detect impact, and not smaller accelerations like the Wii controller does. What I am saying is that the sensor doesn’t know it is being dropped, it just knows that it hits the table.
Here is another data dump from the sensor. I tapped the sensor on the table two times every second. It’s two short taps followed by me waiting for the receiver to show it received a packet.
8×8 RGB Buttons Project Description
Posted by aaron in Uncategorized on February 16th, 2008
Project Description
We are creating an 8×8 matrix of RGB LED buttons. SparkFun sells a 4×4 button pad and circuit board for this. We’re going to connect four of those together to make an 8×8 grid. When you press a button, it will cycle through 8 colors: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, black and white.
It would be cool if you could save these images that you make, and then show them as a slideshow, although that will be a secondary goal that we’ll shoot for only after we get the LEDs and buttons working in the first place. The Arduino has 512 bytes of EEPROM memory (which will not be lost when you turn off the board.) You can read and write to this with the EEPROM functions. This would allow us to store 512/64 = 8 images.
Parts List
4 Button pad breakout boards
4 Rubber button pads
100 RGB LEDs (Common Cathode) There are also lots of other listings of the same item.
4 or 16 MAX7219 LED matrix drivers (maxim-ic, digi-key)
Helpful Links
A good explanation of keyboard scanning
Arduino code for using the MAX7219 chips
Development Info
I am unsure at this point whether we can run the 8×8 leds with one LED driver per color, or if we’ll need one LED driver per 4×4 board. I think it depends on how the boards are wired. Since the drivers are not as cheap as I thought, it is kind of important that we figure this out soon. Or we could just order 16 of them and plan on adding them to the pool of available electronics, since they’ll be useful for something else some day anyway.
Reverse Engineering the Nike+iPod Protocol
I just got a Nike+iPod gadget thingy. It’s pretty cool, and stores all the running stats in xml files on the iPod, making for easy hacking of the running data. However, that’s not what I really want to do with it.
I got one of Sparkfun’s USB serial adapters for it, and can now get the raw data off of it. What I need to be able to detect is whether the sensor received an impact.
Before I bought this, I had heard that the sensor in the shoe transmits its ID every time the runner takes a step. However, after a little experimentation, I found this is not the case. Stepping on the sensor activates it, and once active, broadcasts some data chunks every 1 second. The dump below is from me dropping the sensor on the table, then letting it sit there until it stopped sending. You can see it took 13 seconds of just sitting there before it stopped sending data.
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A6 45 59 1F 91 DC 8E C4 FB 66 37 DB 010 9E 75 69 6F 99 08 C4 0A 95 BE
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A7 1C 94 06 1A 84 A8 010 9A 22 E8 F8 8B F9 67 44 0E 6B AB BB E0 C2 53
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A8 57 53 73 39 0F 14 DE 0E 3B 5C 38 73 22 72 23 AD 3A 49 C9 1A 4A EF
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AA 06 85 D1 B6 9F AB B7 20 3C B9 CD EF DA 6B E5 5D E8 86 A7 42 36 B0
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AB EF DC BC ED 7F FB 7E 9B 89 31 07 57 4B B5 B3 79 DA FC E2 4B 8F CA
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AC 78 B4 0B 79 76 3D 08 B8 F2 B8 C6 D5 B2 AB 13 C7 68 0E 6B E2 78 CC
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AD 2B 17 0E DA E4 E3 B2 AF 65 5B 90 1F D5 72 F7 85 89 A8 9F A6 FD AE
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AE A1 3E 49 7C 5E C4 4A 5B 29 0A 9A 9D A3 E5 D0 EE 66 D4 53 F9 010 F3
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 AF AC CD 2A 92 46 79 E4 53 34 32 D1 6A F7 22 E8 6D C6 D1 9D CB 67 03
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A0 B3 69 55 76 07 76 11 CC 9D A8 AD 29 3B B9 87 A4 17 F1 F9 CB 06 65
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A1 23 53 40 C5 F5 22 50 BD 83 F1 5D 69 EC D0 4D 1C D0 DA 49 EA A9 2D
FF 55 1E 09 0D 0D 01 70 C5 07 30 A2 6F 27 1A 08 2A 93 81 B6 33 2F A0 6B BF B6 D1 4C 9B 0F 33 D1 16 41
(If you look closely, you’ll see some 010’s in there. That is obviously not a real hex byte, and has something to do with the VB program that Sparkfun put together. I can’t actually get the checksums to work out, otherwise I’d be able to tell what it should be.)
Here is what we know so far, compiled from here and here
FF 55 : Apple Accessory Protocol header
1E : length of packet data (from mode through data before checksum)
09 : mode for Nike+
0D 0D : command
01 : unknown (start of parameter)
70 C5 07 30 : my transmitter’s ID
A5 : appears to be a counter, always starts with A, counts from 0-F
next 21 bytes : unknown
79 : 8 bit additive checksum ((sum of all length/mode/command/parameter bytes) & 0xFF) Note: I can’t actually get this to calculate out correct on any of the rows. I must be doing something wrong.
Currently I don’t have enough information in order to be able to tell whether a packet contains a footstep or not, since it continues to transmit even after it stops getting footsteps.
Links:
http://www.ipodlinux.org/Apple_Accessory_Protocol
http://www.ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24578
http://www.rockbox.org/mail/archive/rockbox-dev-archive-2008-02/0005.shtml
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/systems/privacy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike%2BiPod
http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/
