SPT-NXT

The challenge

The product SPT was selling was an off-shore OEM unit, white-labelled and resold. It captured position and nothing else — no inertial measurement, no Bluetooth — and data came off it over USB, so every session ended with a physical download. Reselling a platform they did not own also meant SPT could not extend it, and left them exposed to an end-of-life decision that was not theirs to make.

The replacement had to serve two audiences at once. Coaches want stats during the game — distance run, sprints, max acceleration, time on the field, impacts taken. Players want the complete raw log afterwards. One is a live link that has to hold across a pitch; the other is a bulk transfer at the end of a session.

The work

Tekt's scope ran end to end: concept design, parts sourcing, circuit board design, firmware, in-house testing, and every prototype used for field testing.

Two microcontrollers, two data paths

The answer to the two audiences was a patented configuration of microcontrollers on the SPT-NXT board: one microcontroller dedicated to Bluetooth, a second giving fast and flexible data transfer over USB. That split is what lets the unit stream to the companion app during play and log to onboard memory at the same time, so a session survives a dropped connection — and holding the live link reliably across a full pitch took rounds of testing. Alongside GNSS location capture, Tekt integrated a magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer, so the inertial and position measurements could be fused rather than read separately. The shipping unit records at 10 Hz and holds ten hours of data on board.

Miniaturisation and sealing

All of it had to fit around a battery large enough to cover a full session, and miniaturisation was the constraint that shaped the rest of the design. The finished wearable weighs 27 grams and logs for six hours — two AFL games — between charges. It also had to seal, because the product is used in the rain: it is water-resistant to IP65 behind a hinged air-tight seal designed to keep out liquids and dust, and a substantial share of the engineering effort went into the sealing alone.

The data and diagnostics interface behind GameTraka

The companion software, GameTraka, was written by SPT's own sports scientists. Tekt developed the data and diagnostics interface alongside their software team: the path a session takes off the device — live over Bluetooth while the game is running, in bulk over USB afterwards — and the diagnostics side of that same link. It is the seam between the hardware and the software halves of the product. On the other side of it, GameTraka presents speed, distance, intensity, work rate, heart rate, intervals, running zones, heatmaps, printable reports and player benchmarking.

The charging dock

Tekt also built the charging dock: an IP-rated USB hub that charges, stores and transports a full squad as one portable case, charging and transferring data for up to 15 units at once over 15 micro-USB ports.

Manufacture and release

The design reached manufacturable hardware in a single iteration. Tekt manufactured the pilot run of six hundred units in house at its Melbourne fabrication facility, then transferred the design to a contract manufacturer in Vietnam for a further three thousand. The two companies announced the product in August 2017 and expected release around December.

About the client

Sports Performance Tracking is a Melbourne company selling wearable metrics into amateur and semi-professional clubs in both football codes, Australian rules and soccer — the teams that want the telemetry the professional game runs on and cannot afford the premium systems, which was the point of building it. The product is still in active sale: SPT lists the SPT-NXT pack on its own store in sizes from XSmall to XXLarge, with team pricing for five units or more, across Australian football, soccer, rugby, hockey, American football and lacrosse. The same page carries testimonials from coaches, fitness trainers, physiotherapists and performance analysts at clubs in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa and Colombia.