[Andrew Wilson] is a pretty extreme guy. He base jumps for fun, and is also a hacker. And while you can try to explain the awesome adrenaline rush that comes with this kind of extreme hobby, it’d be nice if you could show it off, you know, quantitatively. So, he decided to make his own EKG, pair it with his GoPro, and go for a jump!

An EKG is an electrocardiogram — a fancy term for a heart rate monitor — and [Andrew’s] has built his own using a small instrument amplifier circuit. This circuit amplifies the differential signal put out by your heart. The data are fed through an ADC on an Arduino Uno, and then saved to a SD card. He also added a piezo buzzer to try to help sync the data to the video — unfortunately it was too quiet for the GoPro to pick up. So for now he’s stuck with pressing record and start on his EKG at the same time.

Once he was satisfied with a few safe tests, he decided to take it for a base jump. For our viewing pleasure, he’s taken the data collected from the EKG and post-processed it into a nice scrolling graph overlay for the video.

We guarantee your hands will get sweaty as his heart rate goes up as he prepares to make the plunge.

Continue reading “Wearing A Homemade EKG Whilst Base Jumping!” →