# Make a step counter

In this adventure, you’ll learn how to use the motion sensor to turn the SpinWheel into a StepCounter.

A step counter needs to detect motion, add up each time motion is detected, and somehow display the cummulative value. The SpinWheel has a motion sensor that can deal with the first task, a small controller (computer) that can perform the addition, and a number of LEDs that can be used as a display. Here we will see how to put these features together to make our own custom step counter.

To start, plug in the SpinWheel to your computer and open up an “empty” sketch in the Arduino software. If you need help remembering how to do this, you can get a recap of how to connect your SpinWheel to your computer in our “Quick Start Guide”.

We will build our Step Counter program in this empty sketch. First, copy the following into that empty sketch:

#include "SpinWearables.h"
using namespace SpinWearables;

void setup() {
// Connect to the computer, so we can read status messages.
Serial.begin(115200);
// Ensure the special SpinWheel hardware is working.
SpinWheel.begin();
}

void loop() {
// Send a confirmation message over and over.
Serial.print("I am working!");
// Print a new line after each message.
Serial.println();
}

Now we’ll go through the code necessary to measure the motion of the SpinWheel. This is the first step in making our step counter. To see how this code can be written, just scroll down a bit farther.

For every iteration of loop we need the motion sensor to report the new values: we do this by erasing th content inside of loop and calling SpinWheel.readIMU() where IMU stands for Inertial Measurement Unit, a fancy name for something that senses motion. To use these measurements, we need to add some more code.

Since we don’t care in which direction the motion is strongest, we can use a single number to report the overall motion of the SpinWheel. One way to do that is using what mathematicians call “calculating the magnitude” or “calculating the norm” of a “vector.”

If you want to learn more about what a vector is and how they are used by mathematicians and engineers, check out our lesson on “Vectors”.

One way to do it is to calculate $\sqrt{a_x^2+a_y^2+a_z^2}$ where $$a_x$$ is the acceleration in the x directions and so on. The code to do that operation looks like sqrt(SpinWheel.ax*SpinWheel.ax + SpinWheel.ay*SpinWheel.ay + SpinWheel.az*SpinWheel.az). We will save this value in the variable total_acceleration.

We will also send this value to the computer connected to the SpinWheel in order to confirm that everything is working. The command Serial.print(total_acceleration) does just that. In the Arduino software we can use Tools -> Serial Plotter to visualize the results.

Here is all this code put together:

#include "SpinWearables.h"
using namespace SpinWearables;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(115200);
SpinWheel.begin();
}

void loop() {
// The "sum of the squares" is a common way to measure total ammount of
// motion independent of direction. Mathematicians call it "the norm of
// the vector describing the motion".
float total_acceleration = sqrt(SpinWheel.ax*SpinWheel.ax+SpinWheel.ay*SpinWheel.ay+SpinWheel.az*SpinWheel.az);
Serial.print(total_acceleration);
Serial.println();
}

You might have noticed that we are only detecting motion; we are not actually counting steps yet. Since writing the code that turns the SpinWheel into a step counter is complicated, it is helpful to break it up into less complicated steps. Through programming the SpinWheel, we will help you learn how to split a big problem into small pieces for yourself. We hope you will find this skill useful not only when programming!

Our next task is to change the SpinWheel’s LEDs based on this motion data. Having visual feedback at each stage of our work makes it easier to detect errors in our codee. We will use the setLargeLEDsUniform function to turn all 8 of the large LEDs on at the same time. We will use an equal mixture of red, green, and blue, in order to make them light up in white.

To further explore why we can trick our brains to perceive a red, blue, and green LED really close together as white, check out the “Biology of Sight” activity.

The intensity of each color will be proportional to the detected acceleration. However, you might have noticed that the total_acceleration value is 1, not 0, at rest. This is because the accelerometer cannot distinguish between the force of gravity acting on it at all times, and the forces of inertia acting on it when you shake it. To account for that, we subtract 1 from this value. This is how we obtain kinematic_acceleration = total_acceleration - 1. “Kinematic” is a fancy word physicists use to refer to things related to motion. We calculate intensity based on that value with intensity = 20*kinematic_acceleration and use it in the setLargeLEDsUniform function. We chose a factor of 20 in order to make the LEDs brighter. Below you can see the code in its entirety.

There are a lot of intricate facts about motion and gravity, related to the fact that our motion sensor can not distinguish between the two. You can read more about it in the section on “Inertial reference frames and Free fall”. Einstein himself was thinking about this everyday fact when he was developing the general theory of relativity.

#include "SpinWearables.h"
using namespace SpinWearables;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(115200);
SpinWheel.begin();
}

void loop() {
float total_acceleration = sqrt(SpinWheel.ax*SpinWheel.ax+SpinWheel.ay*SpinWheel.ay+SpinWheel.az*SpinWheel.az);
// This total_acceleration includes the effect of the gravitational
// field even at rest.  We want only the component of that measurement
// that is related to motion.
// Kinematic is a fancy word for "related to moving".
float kinematic_acceleration = abs(total_acceleration - 1.0);
// Turn on the large LEDs when noticing motion.
// The intensity for each color goes from 0 to 255 on the SpinWheel,
// so we multiply the value of the kinematic_acceleration by a largish
// number, to make the light more noticeable.
int intensity = 20*kinematic_acceleration;
// We mix equal red, green, and blue for white light.
SpinWheel.setLargeLEDsUniform(intensity, intensity, intensity);
// And we tell the SpinWheel to show the light pattern we registered on
// the previous line.
SpinWheel.drawFrame();
Serial.print(intensity);
Serial.println();
}

Finally, we can work on our goal: using the SpinWheel to display all of our detected motion in order to show how much we have moved over time. We will simply add up the values for “kinematic_acceleration”. For this we don’t have to be particularly precise: we just want one number that contains some information about the total motion we have exerted. We can call that variable total_motion and each time we detect motion we update it with total_motion = total_motion + conversion_factor * kinematic_acceleration. We introduced the small number conversion_factor so that we keep the value of total_motion growing slowly.

We only want motions of a certain size to be counted as motion. We can do this by introducing a minimum threshold under which motion is not counted. We do that by using an if statement of the form if (kinematic_acceleration>threshold). Without this addition to our code, small vibrations would be falsely included in our count.

Finally, we use the 12 smaller LEDs in order to show the value of total_motion. If total_motion is 1, we light up only the first LED. If it is 5, we light up the first five LEDs, and so on. We use the SpinWheel.setSmallLEDs() function to do that.

#include "SpinWearables.h"
using namespace SpinWearables;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(115200);
SpinWheel.begin();
}

float total_motion = 0;
float threshold = 0.1;
float conversion_factor = 0.01;

void loop() {
float total_acceleration = sqrt(SpinWheel.ax*SpinWheel.ax+SpinWheel.ay*SpinWheel.ay+SpinWheel.az*SpinWheel.az);
float kinematic_acceleration = abs(total_acceleration - 1.0);
int intensity = 20*kinematic_acceleration;
SpinWheel.setLargeLEDsUniform(intensity, intensity, intensity);
// Accumulate all of the motion readings over time in a single number.
// To avoid false readings, perform the accumulation only if the motion
// was sufficiently strong.
if (kinematic_acceleration>threshold) {
total_motion = total_motion+conversion_factor*kinematic_acceleration;
}
// Display how much you have moved, by turning on the corresponding
// number of small LEDs.
SpinWheel.setSmallLEDs(0,total_motion,255,255,255);
SpinWheel.drawFrame();
Serial.print(total_motion);
Serial.println();
}

You might need to experiment with the value of conversion_factor in order to make your device present the total number of steps in a way you like. In the demo below we have also changed some of the colors. Can you do something similar?

Other interesting features would be to show different colors when the detected acceleration is too small to be counted. Moreover, you can use the colors of the small LEDs to give more information.