Navigation Wearable

Projects
Participants	John henry
Skills	programming, electronics, mapping
Status	Planning
Niche	Electronics
Purpose	Fun

A wearable navigation device (probably a belt) which always communicates the direction of magnetic North.

Navigating a strange city has gotten much easier in the past 10 years. I remember relying on paper maps, printing out mapquest directions, and even sms-ing google to get step by step directions in 140 characters.

But in 2018, I still find myself walking around staring at a smartphone screen. Getting out of a metro or train station and figuring out the orientation, or waiting for my phone GPS to figure out which direction I'm facing.

Inspired by similar academic and hacker projects such as the FeelSpace Belt, Northpaw from Noisebridge.

Parts Acquired:

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Minimu-9 v5 Gyro, Accelerometer, and Compass
• 5 3v coin vibration motors (20 more ordered)
• Cheap hidden pocket money belt
• Flat ethernet cable

To do:

• Set up RPI with i2c interface library for IMU
• Install / test minimu9 library https://github.com/DavidEGrayson/minimu9-ahrs
• Figure out how to calibrate headless
• Figure out / test GPIO for coin motors & power draw
• Get appropriately small USB battery
• Figure out slimmer RPi Zero case

Brainstorming:

• Think about what other interface modes would be useful; North only, navigation mode
• What other information can I get from the IMU that would be interesting?
• What is the ideal form factor? A belt, an anklet, some separate modules?
• Can you do better than magnetic north? Is there a database that maps magnetic to true north globally?

Ambitions:

• Use open source mapping framework to offer turn by turn mode in place of only North over BTLE from iphone