What 'flight' controller for open water swimming?

kiwironnie

New member
The idea here is to develop a device to 'flight' control a swimmer via haptic feedback.
This is to solve a problem that it can be very difficult to keep on track to a distant target, such as a point on an opposite shoreline across a tidal inlet.
Freestyle swimming is pretty much blind and I've found myself swimming in circles. To have to keep looking up spoils the rhythm and the fun.
Therefore looking to develop a simple GPS/gyro system that buzzes 2 little vibrators spaced apart on the swimmer's back, which will indicate which direction to turn.
Although I design electronics as a job my knowledge of flight controllers is almost zero!
So looking for practical advice on the best controller to buy and firmware to modify.
The controller I guess should figure out a compass bearing to a (the next) target waypoint via gps then try to keep the swimmer on track by buzzing left or right, whilst resetting the bearing via GPS at intervals. Or a similar scheme.
It needs to be reasonably easy to configure the waypoints on a map ready for each swim.
The battery can be contained on the safety float that is often used for open water swimming, with a power wire fitted along its tether.
Advice on the smallest, low cost controller (with gps, gyro and / or magnetometer) would be greatly appreciated, together with a suitable software stack that I can modify.
Cheers
Ron
 

kiwironnie

New member
Rather than a specific flight controller, because the application is relatively simple, I'm looking at using something like a Ublox NEO-7M GPS module with built-in compass and an mcu development board. Possibly a Nucleo L432KC, one of which is on the shelf here. It depends really on firmware availability as I'd rather use as much off-the-shelf firmware as possible, as the goal is to quickly produce something that works. Arduino will run on these ARM boards but its not clear if there are any significant limitations. Mbed (which has good support for the L432KC) is also a possibility as there are certainly Ublox and compass libraries there. Anyway I guess you guys are all involved in far more complex flight applications.