Trendsetters

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  Controller

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  Controller

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  right Trendsetter beta

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  Both Trendsetter betas

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  left Trendsetter beta

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  board on Trendsetter beta

Inspiration

Alex is a Latin ballroom dancer. As a member of Penn's Latin ballroom dance team, he often sees newcomers come in and try to pick up the craft. Most often, the first trial they have to overcome is making sure that their movements are on-beat and to the pace set by the current song. As dancers of different styles, Dima and Nikil also felt the need immediately for something that could guide a dancer. As people who also used to be big into running, we saw the application there immediately as well.

Looking at the patent literature, there is nothing that does quite what we want. We combed through around 50 patents, and they were mostly about tracking pace, not setting it.

What it is

The Trendsetters are lightweight wearables that help you keep pace and stay on beat.

The Trendsetters beta include pressure sensors and vibrators in a shoe insole. Each shoe insole is connected to a small board that sits on the outside of the shoe. Each board is synced together by an external controller.

What it does

Via the external controller, a user can input a pace as beats per minute or plug in their own music into the controller's headphone jack to sync the pace to the music. The controller wirelessly communicates to the shoes what BPM is set and when to start or stop. The communications are kept very minimal to save battery because the controller only sends a signal when there is a change in state.

When the wearer's foot is on the ground at the correct time, they are on pace and the shoes will not buzz. If a foot is on the ground at the wrong time, the shoe will buzz to indicate that the foot is off-pace. The shoe will stop buzzing when the user picks up their foot and returns to correct pacing.

How we built it

Each board uses an mbed NXP LPC1768 and an MF24J40MA Radio Frequency antenna. We added regulators for the shoe boards so that we could connect small batteries to the boards.

Challenges we ran into

Protoboards made hardware tasks take much longer than if we had used breadboards, especially in cases where mistakes were made and wires had to be resoldered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got the code to work correctly on the first try!

What we learned

Choosing the proper components is just as important as getting all of the high-level conceptual work done properly.

What's next for Trendsetters

We will patent our idea. Our plan is to design a real commercial product and have it marketable within the next few months. It would be all compacted into a wearable insole using flexible PCBs. The shoes would communicate with a phone or another Bluetooth-connected device so that the user can set a pace and also see their results.

Built With

• c++
• imu
• mbed
• pressure-sensors
• rf
• vibrators