O
ur hearts often feel like they’re skipping
a beat when we see the latest ingenious
projects from the ever-talented Raspberry
Pi community. With this project, however, we
could go as far as viewing the actual effects they
have on our ticker, since a trio of students at
Queen Margaret’s School in York have worked on
a heart‑rate monitor using pHATs from Pimoroni
and a pulse sensor.When tasked with a developing a project during their Raspberry Pi classes,
these students took the healthy option, as David Crookes explains
Heart-rate monitor
Jon
WittsJon Witts is a
certified Raspberry
Pi certified educator
and the director of
digital strategy at
Queen Margaret’s
School in York,
where he teaches
the Computer
Science courses.
@QM_CompSciMAKERElena Lardies Lopez, Harriette Pemberton, and
Myrtle Morley created the device as part of their
computing lessons. “The school teaches a unit
called ‘Physical Computing with the Raspberry Pi’
module and the students learn about connecting
electronic devices [and controlling them from]
a Raspberry Pi computer before forming small
groups and deciding on a physical project,”
explains Jon Witts, the school’s director of
digital strategy.Revised plans
After deciding on their initial aims – to create a
watch that could track and display the wearer’s
step count and heart rate – the students began
to plan. They had to break down the problem and
research how they could make their project: from
the programming involved, to how it would be
physically developed, and the hardware that would
be needed.the pulse sensor attached With
to a finger, the heart’s beats-
per-minute can be readThe students originally wanted
to make a heart-monitoring
watch but decided, due to the
size of the Raspberry Pi Zero, to
create a holdable device insteadThe environmental sensing board Enviro
pHAT was able to collect data from the
plug-and-play Pulse Sensor AmpedThe beats-per-minute
can be shown on the
Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD14 magpi.cc Heart-rate monitor
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