Ever need a cheap motion tracker for very basic object following? Did you know you can throw one together with a few IR distance sensors and a PIC?
The setup is fairly simple. [Aron Horan] is using a dsPIC30F4011 PIC, a SHARP infrared distance sensor, an RC servo, and a PICkit2 for testing. It works by scanning left and right using the servo motor. When the edge of an object is detected, it will turn away from the object until it can no longer detect the edge — then it turns back. Unfortunately this does mean it will always be twitching, even when it’s tracking an object.
Like many of the other projects [Aron] has documented, he’s included everything you need to know to be able to recreate the project yourself. Flowcharts, wiring diagrams, and the code — written in C of course! The following video includes an excellent demonstration, but if you want to skip straight to the action, you can see it start tracking a multimeter at about 0:39 in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MUBVgCZxYk
IR sensor look familiar? That’s because we recently featured one of [Aron’s] other projects, the Dodgebot!
Reblogged this on Robotics.
How awesome, then I can re-read what I just read but on another site. Fantastic!
why post this? (genuine query) i have never really got these kind of posts on blogs, they just eat up comments
Because sometimes the spam filter doesn’t catch them. Then we have people replying with sarcastic comments.
Now I can’t put the ‘reblogged’ post into spam without screwing up the threading of all the comments.
Well I apologize for that then. But I have to say that I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have guessed that removal of comments relied on the order in which they were posted.
Yeah, it sucks, but a better comment system for HaD is on the ‘to-do’ list.
I just took it as a compliment. They liked your article and wanted to give you credit for reblogging it. I see it all the time, whats the problem?
Funny, that “scan head” hunting thing – I’ve seen the radar dishes on fighter jets do the same thing.