Arduino Employed Visualizing Sensor Data

An Infrared Distance Sensor as well as Processing is used by Arduino in order to visualize real world sensor data measurements.

The three main components that comprise this project include a Sharp IR sensor, a standard hobby servo, and an Arduino Diecimila. The Sharp IR distance sensors must be used because of the ability to sense objects from 10-80cm and its inexpensive proximity sensor. Although the sensor can only detect objects within a narrow beam, it has been mounted to a servo on the small robot in order to overcome the downfall which could span the sensor approximately 180° of reach.

Testing the IR sensor is the first step in the process where the analog pin 0 is attached to the sensor output as well as the power and ground as bits of code are loaded into the Arduino. The code should provide analog values between 0 and 600ish with the higher numbers indicating a closer object once the test circuit is properly wired.

The serial data from the Arduino is read by the program in Processing where a pie chart is created to represent the sensor angle and the radius to distance.

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