So we have been attempting to get a sonar working on our robot this year, and well we’ve run into a problem. We wired it by cutting off the male end of the pwm. Then we soldered it black to ground, red to +5, and white to AN (analog).
We looked through their diagrams and information for the maxbotix sonar and we figured out that if we tested it with the voltmeter, it would show about 9.8 mV per inch, but when we tried actually testing it, we couldnt get it working. Any suggestions?
Our team has problems with the sensor as well, eventually we just fed the signal/voltage wire (AN Pinout) from the ultrasonic straight to PMW slot one on the analog controller and just pulled the voltage from there, and scaled the output accordingly to get the distance it was reading.
Actually we are testing it by just using the voltmeter to test if our sonar works in general. We might try running code just through the analog. It is currently plugged into one of the pins that are on the analog breakout in the cRIO. We read that we can get 5 volts from there. So in general, we arent getting any readings when testing if our sonar works.
OK, so you have +5 V at the “+5V” pin, and Ground on the GND pin, and using a voltmeter between the AN pin and GND you are not seeing any DC voltage, even though the target is, say, around 5 feet away? You should be reading about 0.060 volts for 60 inches.
If this is the EZ-1 you might check on this tidbit I got from the datasheet.
*RX – This pin is internally pulled high. The EZ1 will continually measure range and output if RX data is left unconnected or held high. If held low the EZ1 will stop ranging
a
*
Use your voltmeter to ensure that the RX pin is indeed being pulled up.