Polaroid Sonar For Robotics

sonar

This is another repurposing hack to help you along with your robotics projects. The guide shows you how to disassemble a polaroid camera to get the sonar sensors. Don’t worry, it also covers how to use them. The camera also has a lot of other parts you can salvage.

14 thoughts on “Polaroid Sonar For Robotics

  1. Polaroid used to sell this ultrasonic module independently. I even built a project around it back in 1994. judging from the code in the linked article, the module from the camera is a little more usable. the old module had separate pulse init and echo received lines, and the echo line would trip on the outgoing pulse, necessitating a delay before looking for the echo.

  2. Where’s the witchcraft? He’s hacking a component from a camera (that probably has microcontrollers in it) to interface with his own microcontrollers. Seems pretty straightforward (and rather cool) from here.

    Anyway. Since hackaday is slashdotting (err… hackadaying?) sites now, maybe they should just link to cached copies in the future rather than using direct links. ;)

  3. sonar can be used to create pictures (like your dad fish finder, or those military things) at very high sample rates with very precise equipment. for example, if you created a sonar device yourself you may want to include a way for it to distinguish between waves reflected from a nearby object, as well as various levels behind that object. this, with a high sample rate, and scanning, can create an ‘image’ if you will, of distances. but not the kind of image you are i are used to.

    so, that said, this device falls short on two levels… one, it can not distinguish levels in its current setup, and two, it has a very low sample rate in its current setup. _that_ said, no, it can not create images. thank you.

  4. The sonar is for ranging information only.

    And this hack has some whiskers on it too.
    Nothing wrong with it mind you, it’s just been around for a long long time, like since 1998 long, if not longer.

    I VPed The Robotics Club of Yahoo for six years, and it’s made the rounds there since I was on board!

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