Raspberry Pi Creates Melody
For those who are not into prog rock in the 70s or old radio shows from the 40s, the Theremin may be an unfamiliar musical instrument. As a purely electronic …read more Continue reading Raspberry Pi Creates Melody
Category Archives: distance sensor
Raspberry Pi Creates Melody
For those who are not into prog rock in the 70s or old radio shows from the 40s, the Theremin may be an unfamiliar musical instrument. As a purely electronic …read more Continue reading Raspberry Pi Creates Melody
Teensy MIDI Air Harp Sounds Huge
Some of the coolest sounds come from wild instruments like orchestra strings, fretless basses, and theremins — instruments that aren’t tied down by the constraints of frets and other kinds …read more Continue reading Teensy MIDI Air Harp Sounds Huge
A Digital White Cane for the Visually Impaired
The white cane (and its many variants) is an everyday carry for many visually impaired people. This low-tech tool allows those afflicted by visual impairment to safely navigate the world …read more Continue reading A Digital White Cane for the Visually Impaired
Parking Assistant Helps Back Up the Car Without Going Too Far
Sure, [Ty Palowski] could have just hung a tennis ball from the ceiling, but that would mean getting on a ladder, testing the studfinder on himself before locating a ceiling joist, and so on. Bo-ring. Now that he finally has a garage, he’s not going to fill it with junk, …read more
Continue reading Parking Assistant Helps Back Up the Car Without Going Too Far
Facing the Coronavirus
Some of us are oblivious to how often we touch our faces. The current finding is we reach for our eyes, nose, or mouth every three to four minutes. Twenty times per hour is an awful lot of poking, picking, itching, and prodding when we’re supposed to keep our hands …read more
xLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors
[JRodrigo]’s xLIDAR project is one of those ideas that seemed so attractively workable that it went directly to a PCB prototype without doing much stopping along the way. The concept was to mount a trio of outward-facing VL53L0X distance sensors to a small PCB disk, and then turn that disk with a motor and belt while taking readings. As the sensors turn, their distance readings can be used to paint a picture of the immediate surroundings (at least within about 1 meter, which is the maximum range of the VL53L0X.)
The hardware is made to be accessible and has a …read more
Continue reading xLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors
Hackaday Prize Entry: MappyDot, a Micro Smart LiDAR Sensor
[Blecky]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize is MappyDot, a tiny board less than a square inch in size that holds a VL53L0X time-of-flight distance sensor and can measure distances of up to 2 meters.
MappyDot is more than just a breakout board; the ATMega328PB microcontroller on each PCB provides filtering, an easy to use I2C interface, and automatically handles up to 112 boards connected in a bus. The idea is that one or a few MappyDots can be used by themselves, but managing a large number is just as easy. By dotting a device with multiple MappyDots pointing in different …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: MappyDot, a Micro Smart LiDAR Sensor
Testing Distance Sensors
I’m working on a project involving the need to precisely move a tool based on the measured distance to an object. Okay, yeah, it’s a CNC mill. Anyway, I’d heard of time of fight sensors and decided to get one to test out, but also to be thorough I wanted to include other distance sensors as well: a Sharp digital distance sensor as well as a more sophisticated proximity/light sensor. I plugged them all into a breadboard and ran them through their paces, using a frame built from aluminum beams as a way of holding the target materials at a …read more
Ultrasonic Raspberry Pi Piano
Cheap stuff gets our creative juices flowing. Case in point? [Andy Grove] built an eight-sensor HC-SR04 breakout board, because the ultrasonic distance sensors in question are so affordable that a hacker can hardly avoid ordering them by the dozen. He originally built it for robotics, but then it’s just a few lines of code to turn it into a gesture-controllable musical instrument. Check out the video, embedded below, for an overview of the features.
His Octasonic breakout board is just an AVR in disguise — it reads from eight ultrasonic sensors and delivers a single SPI result to whatever other …read more
