Dec 30 2019

Re: WeTooMove, Adafruit Contest.

A team from San Diego State University and I (Paul Antonucci, Alberti's Window)  have developed a wireless IR camera/software system, the WeTooMove, which, like the Nintendo Wii, tracks IR-bright objects in its field of view.

  1. Five object locations, sizes, and brightnesses are sent via Bluetooth to a host computer at a software programmable rate (currently 10 times per second, can go up to 60 fps).
  2. It can be used with the Wii “sensor bar”, to track position in 3 dimensions.
  3. It is a low-cost design (~$50 in parts at retail at Adafruit and from PixArt, simple assembly), and has many fun educational activities to go along with it.
  4. It is powered by a rechargeable Li-Ion battery. The WeTooMove is plugged into a USB port when not in use in order to recharge it. It will run ~ 20 hours on a charge.
  5. A substantial software package has been developed in C#/Windows to support the device and activities.
  6. Both the hardware and software are to be open source.

This technology was developed as part of an NSF-funded project to improve mathematics teaching, headed by Professor of Mathematics Education Ricardo Nemirovsky1.

His research focusses on getting people moving around, and then thinking mathematically about their motion. He has been principally responsible for developing this idea, and calls it “embodied cognition.”

It should be popular among the maker community, the museum community, and the Education community.

You can read about Ricardo at https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/education/crmse/ricardo_nemirovsky.aspx

About me: I have been developing fun
gizmos for education using computers and electronics for over 30
years. Many of these projects have won awards and been used in
thousands of classrooms. (e.g. Biofeedback MicroLab
https://www.ebluejay.com/ads/item/4440992, MicroObservatory
Telescopes http://mo-www.cfa.harvard.edu/OWN/about.html, Motion
Visualized 3D http://albertiswindow.com/ ). I've been the PI on several NSF grants.

History:

The Nintendo Wii has been used in education and education research by Ricardo Nemirovsky and others. It was quite frustrating to the users because Nintendo continually made changes in their hardware/software, and then the users applications often stopped working. Furthermore, the Wii firmware source code was not available to user community. Also, The Nintendo Wii is no longer being manufactured.

All these problems can now be avoided, with the open source hardware and open source software of the WeTooMove.

The WeTooMove can track more objects, and so can filter which objects are chosen. Our hardware and software are open source, so users can modify it to suit their needs.

It currently runs on an Adafruit Bluefruit nRF52, programmed with the Arduino environment.

The host software is in C sharp, using the Microsoft Visual Studio, community edition, which is free.

Paul Antonucci Paul@AlbertisWindow.com