Open source hardware community, contributions, CERN-OHL-P licensing, and ecosystem.
The FDC2214 doesn’t measure capacitance directly — it measures the resonant frequency of an LC tank, and that one design choice decides what it’s good at. Here are twelve things you can build with it, from liquid level to micron-scale displacement, with the numbers behind each one and the places where a different chip would serve you better.
Our watch moved health data over a hand-rolled BLE service with its own framing. We deleted it and implemented the same feature set as a custom MCUmgr management group instead — about forty lines of registration boilerplate, and the transport, framing, retries and client tooling came free. Here’s how you extend MCUmgr in Zephyr, what it bought us on HealthyPi Move, and what happened when we did the same thing again on HealthyPi 6 — a different SoC, a different command set, the same forty lines.
HealthyPi Move NEXT is mostly a free over-the-air update to every Move ever shipped — a health-data layer rebuilt on MCUmgr, epoch aggregation that takes on-device retention from 1.2 days to 104, continuous HRV, and a redrawn watch UI. There’s also a redesigned optical stack, but that one’s a board change. Here’s how both work.
Explore the most common real-world applications of capacitive sensing — from non-contact liquid level measurement and proximity detection to industrial IoT — and how open-source boards like the FDC1004 breakout and Sensything CAP make it accessible for makers and engineers.
A practical guide to open source vital signs monitoring — what open source hardware means for medical instrumentation, why researchers and educators are switching, and how to acquire real ECG, SpO2, and respiration signals with ProtoCentral’s HealthyPi platform.
A transparent, spec-driven comparison of ProtoCentral’s open source biosignal hardware against Biopac, ADInstruments, Delsys, OpenBCI, and other commercial systems. No marketing spin — just numbers, capabilities, and trade-offs.
