ANT Forum

Hi, my name is Chong Thor and I am a Senior in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of AR. I was suggested to ANT by a collaborator over at TI in Dallas. I am trying to get real-time measurements of heart rate from an ANT compatible heart rate strap and temperature from multiple thermocouples on the body fro my senior design project. They suggested ANT development kit to me.

Before I order the kit, I have some things I would like to be clarified.

1)Will the development kit be able to obtain a real-time measurement of heart rate from the compatible strap and communicate it to a nearby laptop?

2)Is there a way to communicate the readings from thermocouples to the program?

3)Can we incorporate these two measurements onto just one program and not have to write a program for each?


Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks      

1)Will the development kit be able to obtain a real-time measurement of heart rate from the compatible strap and communicate it to a nearby laptop?

Yes, you can use the USB interface board to receive real time heart rate data from the strap. Please note that the details to connect to the strap and decode the data are only available to members of the ANT+ Alliance. More details on the ANT+ Alliance here
http://www.thisisant.com/ant/ant-alliance

2)Is there a way to communicate the readings from thermocouples to the program?

Yes, you can transmit custom data from your sensors using ANT, you would need to do this at the application level. Please review the "ANT Message Protocol and Usage" document for a better idea of how to communicate with ANT and the type of messages you can send.
http://www.thisisant.com/products/data-sheets-brochures

3)Can we incorporate these two measurements onto just one program and not have to write a program for each?

We provide PC libraries to simplify interfacing with ANT - you can do anything you wish at the application level with the data, so yes, you could do a single program to handle both measurements if you want.