CocoaSteam – Technologies

Sync’ing blood glucose data over Bluetooth to HealthKit

September 13, 2019September 13, 2023Liam

The code for this project is on my GitHub (here).

While newer blood glucose monitors (BGM) have Bluetooth capability (BLE), they are often designed only to sync data to their own clouds. Many applications call for mixing glucose measurements with data like weight, activity, carb consumption from other apps to enable consumers themselves, coaching, or care teams to use the information directly.

This code pulls glucose measurements from a BLE-enabled BGM and stores in:

HealthKit. Many apps and EHRs have HealthKit integration and can use HK as a channel to import glucose data.
Open format. Developer can integrate into other database systems.

The code was developed using a Contour Next One BGM since it was found in a study published by the Diabetes Technology Society to be the most accurate of the set of 18 BGMs tested and one of the few to meet the FDA accuracy standard for glucometers.

The Bluetooth Forum developed a standard “GATT” profile for BGMs. Details can be found here.

Reads from the BGM are performed via its “Record Access Control Point (RACP)” characteristic. The code writes to RACP requesting data from the Bluetooth Glucose Measurement read more

Heart and respiration rate detection during sleep…. going balistocardiography!

May 3, 2019September 13, 2023Liam

As you sleep, the motion of the heart beat and resulting surges of blood around the body cause the body and bed to shake. Just a bit, but enough to detect with a MEMs accelerometer like the orientation sensor in your phone as well as in step counting fitness trackers. A good paper on the subject is here: NIH paper

You can use this effect to detect heart rate, respiration rate, heart rate variance (a good measure of stress) as well as sleep/wake times; all while you sleep without needing to wear a device. This is key since to collect sleep data over months/years, it is important that the process be transparent to the user; just tape the sensor to the edge of the mattress and forget about it.

This approach has been studied for 100 years and has been made practical by emergence of cheap, sensitive technologies like MEMs. Joonas Paalasmaa’s (co-founder of Beddit – acquired by Apple) paper on the subject “unobtrusive online monitoring of sleep at home” is here on Pubmed

Heart read more

Blood Glucose Meter tear down: Contour Next One

March 13, 2019September 13, 2023admin

A recent study by the Diabetes Technology on a cohort of 1000 people found that of 18 popular glucometers in the US, only 6 met the FDA standard for accuracy:

Investigation of the Accuracy of 18 Marketed Blood Glucose Monitors. David C. Klonoff, Joan Lee Parkes, Boris P. Kovatchev, David Kerr, Wendy C. Bevier, Ronald L. Brazg, Mark Christiansen, Timothy S. Bailey, James H. Nichols and Michael A. Kohn. Diabetes Care 2018 Aug; 41(8): 1681-1688.

and another good study on accuracy here: Performance Evaluation of Three Blood Glucose Monitoring Systems Using ISO 15197

I was surprised by 2 things:

Of course that only 6 BGMs met the standard….
The FDA standard itself which specifies accuracy of only +- 15mg/dL at or below 100mg/dl and +-15% above that number. If your fasting blood glucose was measured at say 95mg/dl, that could mean to a 95% confidence level you are anywhere from 80mg/dl (relatively close to hypoglycemia) to 110mg/dl (pre-diabetic).

I decided to take a look inside the best scoring BGM: Contour Next One. Basically it looks like this:

Top side features a simple connector housing for the strip insert, a Toshiba custom analogue front end and an MCU.

A decap of the MCU reveals that it is from Renesas and is likely a R5F51135ADLJ (128KB ROM flash, 32KB RAM, 8KB data flash). This is based on Renesas’ proprietary read more

Pulling Nokia Withings health data API via OAuth1.0

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018Liam

Withings Nokia have a set of connected health devices which allow you to track your activity, blood pressure, weight, fat mass, temperature, sleep etc.

The dataset is available via a set of APIs. Authorization is via OAuth1.0
I put together a Python class library for the authorization steps and data access for use as a module in an Alexa project on Lambda. The code is on GitHub here.

Custom Bluetooth Low Energy board with 2.4GHz antenna hack and Nordic nRF51822…

October 1, 2017March 26, 2018Liam

I wanted to experiment with Bluetooth Low Energy:

Can you hack together in your garage an antenna and RF section that will work at 2.4GHz?
If it works, who good/bad will it be?
What is hand soldering QFN packages like? Many BLE devices are only available in CSP or QFN48.

If you want to make IoT and Wearable devices that can be controlled from your phone/tablet/whatever, ZigBee is a neat mesh networking technology; but it’s not in any phones. Bluetooth (and more recently) Bluetooth Low Energy is in all of them. It’s easy to write a BLE control app write yourself using the Cocoa frameworks or download one like the excellent LightBlue for iPhone:

Using JTAG and Eclipse on MacOS

August 9, 2017March 26, 2018Liam

Though many eval boards come with an embedded JTAG-USB interface, I still like to use a separate purpose-built JTAG debug box.

If you pick the right one:

It can be used with many boards and SoCs. Once set up, one debug toolchain works for many projects.
You can use it to debug MCUs on bread-boarded projects. You will need to make a hacked

STM MEMs pressure sensor, gyroscope and accelerometer hook up to ARM MBED

July 2, 2017March 26, 2018Liam

I used a header board for an STM MEMS evaluation kit in order to take a look at some common MEMS sensors:

LPS301: Pressure and temperature sensor
LG3D20: Gyroscope
LSM303DLHC: Accelerometer and magnetometer

The header was an STEVAL-MKI124V1 which is designed to work with an STM motherboard evaluation system. I took a shortcut and used it with an ARM MBED board featuring an NXP LPC1768 MBED.

Hook-up using I2C was trivial:

The schematic for the evaluation board is here:

Breadboard breakout board for 48pin QFP STM32F100

June 15, 2017March 26, 2018Liam

Quick and simple project to make an adapter PCB to use a QFP packaged MCU on a traditional through-hole breadboard.

I ended up making a double-sided PCB to support 2 different QFP sizes. One side set up for 48 pins, the other for 32pins. Usage is to populate one side or the other, not both….

Simple pin-out to two standard 24-pin headers. No on board components such as decoupling capacitors.

Here is the board in action on a breadboard and loaded up with a 48-pin STM32F100C8:

Eagle files for the board are on GitHub here.

Simplest Cortex-M bring up. Post#1: a no code approach

April 3, 2017March 26, 2018Liam

Powering up a new board design or even skiing off-piste with an eval board without vendor-suppled code? This post shows a way to look for first signs of life without depending on working debug toolchain or working target software.

I use a Segger JTAG probe that I covered in a previous post.

Some recent eval boards like the one for Nordic Micro’s nRF51822 ship with an on-board USB debug connection that has a USB-JTAG decoder chip on board. This board uses the same Segger driver as their JTAG box embedded in the decoder, so the below approach should also work.

Segger JLINK application driver has a series of useful commands for examining directly addresses in memory:

mem Read memory. Syntax: mem , (hex)
mem8 Read 8-bit items. Syntax: mem8 , (hex)
mem16 Read 16-bit items. Syntax: mem16 , (hex)
mem32 Read 32-bit items. Syntax: mem32 , (hex)

Since many MCUs have a factory-programmed ID register, you can use JTAG to read this value and check for signs of life.

To start with, I target a STM32F100C8. This MCU has a register at 1FFFF7E0 hex containing a 16-bit value with the flash size of the MCU. This is covered in the STM32F100 programming manual on page 668.

Launch the Segger JLinkExe application (I am using Mac OSX version). The terminal welcome screen should look something like the below. I removed my Segger serial number. I use the mem16 command to get the 16bit value starting at 1FFFF7E0 hex:

(My entries in red). Notice how the JTAG box finds the STM device automatically over SWD.

The resulting value 40 hex corresponds to 64 decimal i.e. 64KB flash on-board. So, device and board are alive and breathing.

On the Nordic nRF51822, there is an ID register called CONFIGID at 1000005C hex. Bits 0-15 contain a hardware config code. The decoder ring for the value you get back is buried in Nordic’s white paper “Migrating to the latest nRF51822 chip version nWP-018” which currently is here

The 4C00 hex code from my device shows I have a QF AB build code B0 version of nRF51822 which corresponds to the QFN packaged 128KB flash variant.

Using MBED SPI to drive Analog Devices AD9850 frequency synthesizer

January 2, 2017March 7, 2018Liam

I was looking for a way to test the frequency response of a new oscilloscope.

Analog Devices has a nice IC that can produce a digitally synthesized sine wave of frequency between 0 and about 70 MHz. AD9850 link is here.

The quickest way to throw together a prototype was using an MBED platform. My code is here

What made things even easier was the availability of ready-to-go evaluation boards from China on Ebay for less than $5. This is the one I used.

This design is limited to about 40MHz if you want a clean signal without aliasing.

Frequency and phase are set by a 40-bit command that has:

32-bit frequency setting
5-bit phase setting
1-bit power up/down
2-bits factory debug access

Output frequency is given by: fOUT = (frq × CLKIN)/(2^32)

where frq is the 32-bit frequency and CLKIN is the frequency of the on-board crystal (125MHz in this case) So, for example 0x147AE148 is 10MHz.

Frequency resolution has a step size of 29KHz with the 125MHz clock.

You can also change phase in increments of 180°, 90°, 45°, 22.5°, 11.25° or any combination thereof using read more

Simplest NSOutlineView Demo

August 15, 2013March 26, 2018admin

Most NSOutlineView examples I have seen are not that helpful since you spend time trying to figure out how the data model behind the example works rather than seeing how to use the framework itself. Yes, the data model is critical, however if you don’t understand the framework then you won’t be able to write a controller to feed the view or the model…

So. I have tried instead to get started by boiling this all down to the simplest possible configuration.

Before the Memory Leak Police get on to me, the below is not written for memory management beauty but rather to demonstrate the framework; so, the reader is left to figure out the releases. I know I generate lots of objects…and also that I violate MVC….

But, can you make it simpler than this..?

Power up Interface Builder, drop an NSOutlineView into a window, hook up the delegates and outlets like you would for NSTableView. That’s it.

Here is what’s going on in the code.

In Method#1, I hard-wire the code to return that every node has 3 children. You can see that in the output below if you look under the nodes that have been expanded. You could put here any integer or function that returns one.

In Method#2, you have to return a pointer to a unique object for each of the children that you declared in #1. Normally you would ferret around in your data model to find the right object. Here I just generate a new empty object each time and return a pointer to it.

In Method#3 I hard wire-in that every node is expandable.

Finally in Method#4, I demonstrate a point from the last blog entry. You return the data that you want displayed according to with the object you returned from Method#2.

This data can be from within the Method#2 object itself or it can be something completely different, perhaps even completely unrelated to the Method#2 object. For example, you could just return the word “Hello” and have it appear at every node on the view.

I chose to get the address of the Method#2 object (also demonstrating that each object in the tree is unique) and to concat that with some text.

In the next post, a more complicated directory browser. This time with MVC.

NSOutlineView: Part 1 Introduction

June 28, 2013March 26, 2018admin

Introduction

Outline views are great for displaying hierarchical data because they allow the user to drill down into the parts of the dataset that are the most interesting.

A common place where they show up is in file handling windows. So. My last example in this column will be a directory browser. To build an outline view, all you have to do is create the view in Interface Builder, hook it up to your code and implement 4 specific delegate methods. Simple really.

It turns out that unless you try and understand some of what NSOutlineView does behind the scenes, the chances of actually hooking up your data right are remote… If you have a bug, what tends to happen is that you either get an exception/crash or nothing happens. And since much of the inner workings take place beneath the hood inside runtime, it’s not as if you can put a breakpoint inside the NSOutlineView to see what’s going on. It can take many NSLogs in your code to get some visibility.

Delegate Methods

You can think of delegate methods like the outsourcing of a task. When the outline view needs to know more about the data that you would like to display in the view, it simply calls the relevant “delegate” method and expects an answer.

These methods are the interface between your dataset and the onscreen view. At a minimum, NSOutlineView requires you to implement 4 delegate methods in your code. There are several other delegates that are strictly optional and which add more functionality to your outline view.

It’s easier to call the 4 compulsory delegates Method 1-4 instead of their full names; besides, this is the order in which runtime tends to call them anyway, so it’s a useful frame of reference.

Let’s dig in to how it all works.

Method#1

– (int) outlineView: (NSOutlineView *) outlineView numberOfChildrenOfItem:(id)item

This is the first delegate that runtime will call to populate your outline view. It asks the question: “For the node that you just clicked on to expand, how many children objects should I allow for?”

This method is only called on one of 2 occasions. Either:

When the view is first displayed at start up and runtime needs to know the contents of the Root level of your data

When a node is expanded and runtime needs to start building the display of that node’s children.

Since these cases both happen relatively rarely, Method#1 tends to be called the least frequently out of the 4 delegates.

The next delegate methods #2 and #3 will be called the number of times you specify in the number you return now. So, if you return “3” here, they will get called 3 times.

2 values are passed to this delegate by runtime:

(NSOutlineView *) outlineView (or whatever you choose to name the view). This pointer is passed to you in all 4 delegates so I’m only going to bother to explain it once here. When you build an outline view in Interface Builder, you have the option of making a multi-column display. You could have 2 different outlines displaying in each column. To let you know which outlineview runtime is talking about, it sends you a pointer. For a simple 1 column outlineview, you can ignore this pointer.

(id) item. This is a pointer to the object associated with the node that the user clicked on. For example, in the above diagram, when the user clicked on “Applications”, the pointer to item here would point to the object associated with Applications. There

Decoding PWM using cross-coupled timers on the STM32F372

January 12, 2012September 13, 2023admin