“I swim for exercise - sometimes I zone out and forget how many laps I’ve swam. This will keep track for me.
I swim for exercise and occasionally do open water swims and triathlons. I want to swim a set distance and I keep track of how far I’ve swam in my head. Sometimes I zone out and forget exactly how far I’ve gone. This project is to build a lap counter so I don’t have to remember. There are commercial solutions, but they are very expensive. I thought of using RFID chips like the commercial systems use, but RFID for a range of 1 meter aren’t cheap. I also thought of using a PIR motion detector sensor. I’ve used them before but I’m wary of them being too sensitive and unable to tune the distance I want to detect.. Also, I don’t want to detect swimmers who are in the next lane. I ended up using a ultrasonic distance measure and triggered the lap increment when it detects that I’m within a certain distance from the end of the pool. This seems to work well.”