sonar is being lame

So i have been trying to get a ultra sonic senor working and i am having no luck. i have 3 to chose from but don’t know what to use or how to use them.
we have:

  1. The Paralex Ping)))
    http://www.parallax.com/Store/Sensors/ObjectDetection/tabid/176/ProductID/92/List/1/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName,ProductName

  2. the VEX kit one

  3. Max Sonar EZ1 modle

We haven’t gotten anything to give me a good value. If anyone has can they tell me what they did and tell me or show me. If you can that will be a great help to us!

Are you using labview or windriver?

Use either the vex kit one of the maxbotics one.

The vex kit one should have two pwm’s on it one is the ping channel and one is the echo channel. Wire each of these to a digital port on the sidecar. I don’t know what environment you are using.

The Maxbotics one can either be wired for serial, digital, or analog (although you can’t really use serial this year), digital should also have 2 pwm’s, analog should have 1. Our team is using this sensor wired for digital.

I recommend using an analogue ultrasound sensor. If you use a digital sensor, you will have to use interrupts to time how long it takes for the signal to return. I have not tried to do so this year in labview, and have not even looked at windriver. If you use an analogue sensor, you will only have to check to see how much voltage is coming back.

It is all provided in the default code so its not as hard as it was previously :wink:

The WPI libraries for both LabVIEW and C++ handle all of the timing for you.

If you mean the Maxbotics EZ1 sonar, then that’s what we used last year to hug the track divide and it was GREAT.

It’s an analog input so you need to feed it into the Analog Bumper. Read the input voltage and divide by 0.0098 to get inches (9.8mV / inch). You will probably need to filter the input because the cRIO seems VERY noisy.