Post : Fitting a cold, metal heart in an Altoids tin
URL : http://hackaday.com/2013/01/24/fitting-a-cold-metal-heart-in-an-altoids-tin/
Posted : January 24, 2013 at 6:00 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Tags : ecg, heart rate
Categories : Medical hacks, tool hacks

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/sim.jpg

[James] has been building a heart rate monitor using a very cool TI chip. He needed a way to test his device, and commercial ECG simulators, like all biotech devices, are absurdly expensive. [James] decided to build his own heart rate simulator (https://github.com/lynchzilla/ecg_simulator) , and in the process made a great tool and one of the most well documented projects we've ever seen.

Of course, if you're building an ECG simulator, you're going to need a good sample of a heart's electrical pattern. To get this sample, [James] found an old army manual with a diagram of an ideal ECG pattern. [James] took this PDF manual, screen capped the diagram, and used a Python script to generate an array in C the Arduino could repeat over and over.

The rest of the build consisted of a D/A converter, a pot to change the heart rate, a very nice seven-segment display, and a few banana jacks to connect to [James]' heart monitor. Everything is up in a git (https://github.com/lynchzilla/ecg_simulator) , including an amazingly well documented (87 pages!) tutorial for building your own Arduino heart simulator.

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