Hi guys, a local team of volunteers here in NZ, is looking at using a Garmin watch, maybe a forerunner 230 (with sensitive GPS), to develop a navigation application for a blind person, Kit. Also, possibly for more general use for the visually impaired. Kit likes swimming in the sea, but has difficulty finding his way up the beach back to the entrance of a track that leads to his house. So we are considering using a watch to help him navigate, initially via GPS and magnetometer (so that he can orient in the right direction), then using BLE location beacons for the last part of the journey (as it needs higher accuracy than GPS to find the start of the track). However we have never programmed a watch before so have some fundamental questions:
- Is there likely to be sufficient rom/ram to implement a program that does location and compass calculations to guide kit between a series of waypoints? Clearly it depends, but it could be quite a complex programming with floating point calculations.
- Would we effectively be able to take over the user interface to use just keys and tactile feedback from the vibrator? Clearly the screen will be useless to Kit, who also has a hearing problem!
- Has anything like this been done already? If so, references and contacts would be really helpful.
Other comments / views on what we are wanting to achieve would be appreciated.
Best wishes, Ron.
