Wearable footballer tracker
A wearable data logger built on an mbed microcontroller that records a player's movement, position and heading during a real match.
- Year
- 2014
- Context
- Systems engineering group project, Loughborough University
- Tools
- mbed LPC1768, C/C++, I2C, GPS, MATLAB
The aim
Design and build a wearable device that tracks a footballer’s activity during a match, using a structured systems engineering process from requirements to test.
What we built
- An mbed LPC1768 microcontroller reading an accelerometer, a GPS module and a digital compass over I2C.
- Firmware in C/C++ that logs every sensor once a second.
- MATLAB scripts that plot the logged data after the match.
The project followed the Vee model, with a systems engineering management plan (SEMP), traceable requirements and verification at each level.
Results
The prototype captured a full five minutes of real match play with no logging errors. The accelerometer trace shows the vertical axis holding around 1g, with clear spikes for a header, a fall and a slide tackle. That’s enough to tell those events apart automatically.
