ANT wireless

ANT is used to implement wireless sensor networks.

ANT is used by Garmin for its heart rate monitors and several other products including the sensor for bicycle speed and rpm and its shoe pod to count steps.

I have one of the HRMs. I got my sister-in-law one of the shoe pod based pedometers for X-mas.

FoxtrotGPS and TangoGPS have support for the HRM now.

What's the difference between ANT and ANT+?

Some ANT features

• It uses very little power, a sensor can run up to 4 years on a 2032 button cell.
• Hundreds of sensors can be supported in an ANT network.
• Any node can be either a master or a slave.

Available hardware

Off the shelf sensors

From Garmin

• Heart rate monitor (HRM) chest straps.
• Shoe pods. This is an accelerometer that can be clipped to your shoelaces.
• Bicycle speed and rpm (cadence) sensors.

Interfaces

List price for a stick from Garmin is $50; you can get one for $35 from Sparkfun.

The Garmin version is in a plastic housing and uses a Nordic chip that requires a special USB driver. The Sparkfun version is a bare board with an FTDI serial-USB converter so a generic serial driver will work with it. The bare board also gives you direct access to the RX/TX serial signals from the Nordic chip. Sparkfun also has several breakout boards in the $20 range which means it should be pretty easy to build your own sensors.

ANT chips are made by Nordic Semiconductor and Texas Instruments.

Resources

Official information site: http://thisisant.com/

A sample including python on Linux to read an ANT USB stick: http://opensource.quarq.us/ant_usb2_stick/

As mentioned above you can buy chips and breakout boards and USB sticks at good prices from Sparkfun Electronics