Developing own firmware?

napdivad

Has anyone developed their own firmware for MetaWear? If so, how long does it take (and any example code)?

I want to do sensor fusion on-board with at least 100 Hz, and have a custom algorithm that sends a Bluetooth message to the phone when a movement is detected. The alternative is streaming the accelerometer and gyroscope data to the phone, but it's not realistic because it appears the max is 50 Hz, and it drains more battery life than on-board.

Eric

You can contact the OP from this thread to see if he is willing to share his code.  We also have a getting started guide for firmware that shows you how to setup the environment and hardware for flashing custom firmware images.

What do you mean by detecting movement?  Are you looking for specific motion patterns or ony doing simple motion detection such as detecting if there is any motion or no motion?  If it is the latter, then the accelerometer comes with motion classifications algorithms on board and you don't need to write custom firmware.

sleepsafealert

I am looking for something similar. True the accelerometer may be able to detect and detect and classify the motion without the need for custom firmware, but how can I use the classification of an event to initiate the metawear to connect through bluetooth to the android app to report the event? If metaware cannot initiate the bluetooth connection, than the alternative is to always leave bluetooth connected and reporting sensor info.

Eric

MetaWear functions as slave device; it does not initiate BTLE connections.  If you need the data live, then you will have to maintain a connection with your mobile device.  You can tweak the BTLE connection parameters to reduce the power consumption from an active connection if you don't need a high amount of updates i.e. accelerometer level speeds.  If you don't need the data live, you can reocrd motion events to the flash memory and sync with the board later.

JulianChua

Hi Eric, just following up on this as I am also looking to detect specific motion patterns from the gyro and would like to look at custom firmware. The firmware guide seems to be either gone or the link is broken. Is the guide still available?

Cheers  

Eric

The guide was removed as we no longer provide support for custom firmware.  That is, you can create your own firmware but you are on your own if you choose to do so.