For a while now, I’ve been wanting to create a set of foam armor that can keep track of hits and their locations. As a kid I used to like fighting with foam swords, but there wasn’t an easy way to stop people from lying about being hit. It would have been nice to have something like what I describe below:
The basic idea for hit detection I came up with is shown in the image below. Basically, there is a panel of conductive foam between two metal sheets. Wires are attached to each metal sheet, and the sheets are connected to the foam with conductive glue. Conductive foam has the property that when it is compressed its depth-wise resistance decreases. Thus, when the sandwich is struck, the change in resistance should be measureable across the two wires.
By using these wires in a voltage divider, an analog to digital converter connected to a microcontroller should be able to detect when the sheets are struck, and to some degree how hard. I would like to make at least two of these sandwiches, and make a simple wearable sandwich board out of them. The wires from both sandwiches would feed to a single controller down by the hips. Additionally, it would be cool to have an addressable RGB strip located by the shoulder to display “health” as a bar.
The armor suit should also have 4 pin molex connectors - two on the bottom edge, and one on each side edge. The purpose of these connectors is to allow the user to attach arm pads and leg pads. Two of the pins would be for power, and the remaining two would be for I2C communication. On startup, the central controller would search for attached I2C devices, and poll them.
Arm and leg pads would have two DIP switches, for selecting position (upper or lower and left or right). They would have a molex connector that connects to the central controller as well as another connector for daisy chainging pieces. This allows for a user to have an armor piece on their upper arm and forearm, if desired.
I am considering using an MSP430 microcontroller for the peripheral armor pieces, as I have experience with them, and they contain an internal ADC as well as the capability to be an I2C device. For the central controller, I am planning on using an ESP8266, because they are cheap and have both an ADC and I2C capability. The ESP8266 also has the added benefit of being WiFi enabled, so it would be possible to have a central base station that each user connects to for something like a central high score table.