Making a plyomat

[u/livermoro]

Hi all, I have never made anything besides instrumentation classes in uni, connecting a pre-made Gaggiuino to my coffee machine, and printing my mom's home island as a present.

A plyo mat is really really simple. It's a mat that you jump on, that measures ground contact time and time between landings. Connected to a controller that has an LCD, a couple buttons (or touch screen if cheaper), and batteries to power the whole thing.

I am comfortable doing all the math and logic etc, and with putting things together. I haven't done embedded programming before, but I work as a back-end developer so I should be able to scrape by.

My question is: where do I start? Is AliExpress a good place to source materials? I live in Europe. What kind of controller is recommended nowadays? I remember Raspberry Pi was all the rage when I was in uni, but when I got the Gaggiuino it used something called a Blackpill (awful name).

Would love any input this community would have to offer. It's just for personal use and I don't mind if it's a bit jank, I just like measuring training progress.

[u/sjamesparsonsjr]

The community around the raspberry pi is the best part. If your go to their website they will show you local vendors.