Ultrasonic Sensors

[safiq10]

Hi! I guess I'll be blunt about this. We want to start using more sensors such as the maxbotix ultrasonic sensors and we are attempting at buying one but we are so lost in which sensor to buy? So I thought I'd ask which sensors has your team used and how did you use them? Also what are the full use of an Ultrasonic sensor? Examples would be great

Currently our thought is to use it for aligning ourselves with the wall so we can get an accurate shot. We would most likely program it in labview.

[pastelpony]

I believe my team used the Maxbotix MB1020 LV-MaxSonar-EZ2 on our robot. We used it to detect distance from the alliance wall to line up our shot, as we determined the distance we're best at shooting from on the practice field. Our ultrasonic sensor was also programmed in LabVIEW. I'm not sure of any other uses of the ultrasonic sensor, though.

[lamk]

We use the vex ultrasound module and love it. It hooks up to the digital side car with two female to female pwm cable. This year we used it in our autonomous to guide the robot to the correct distance from the wall and shoot. We also use it to guide the driver when to shoot during teleop. Our main driver controls everything and one of the job of the co driver is to yell out the distance of the robot from the wall to indicate if the robot is in the shooting range.
We try to use the maxsonar and could not get consistent distance. It's also an analog device and we have to do some calculation to figure out the distance. Some people said you need a filter for an analog ultrasound sensor. Anyway it was frustrating using it and we have much better luck with the vex ultrasound sensor. The only thing is the vex ultrasound module does not like huge shocks to it. Because of the violent nature of our shooter we fried a total of three sensor from practice to the championship.