Pulse Project was the last project we did during our first year of studying at Metropolia. The goal was to program a Raspberry PI Pico w to measure pulse. The instructions for this project were a bit unclear so we ended up doing a backend and frontend system for this project. We almost made a database as well but that proved too much for the given time we had.

During this project I mainly focused on coding the Raspberry and measuring the pulse. This proved to be very challenging since Raspberry PI Pico w is coded in MircoPython. MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of the Python 3 programming language that includes a small subset of the Python standard library and is optimised to run on microcontrollers and in constrained environments. This sounds nice but finding documentation for MircoPython was difficult and was often lacking. But in the end, I managed to create a working pulse meter.

The way this project works is by storing the data collected by the sensor into to a FIFO-list (first in first out). It then reads the values, determines if a pulse happened and measures time between pulses. Once it has gathered enough data to determine a valid heartbeat, it sends the data to a cloud service to analyse by an API call. The return value is then sent to the server made by other project members. While the sensor gathers data, it displays some data on a small screen on the Raspberry PI.

Overall, this project proved to be challenging but definitely my favourite Python project that I have ever done.