Concept Video

This video shows pretty much the whole story of the project, including the problem space, the concept and most importantly how it works step by step and its ‘actual’ form and functionalities, compared to the ‘ideal’ mentioned in home page section. It is not a very fancy complicated device but it’s all I’ve got considering the limit of time, hope this will answer all the questions you are having regarding the concept if you have any. (Excuse the video quality here due to a very unfortunate turn of event that I broke my phone very recently at the time of making this video, I recorded it with the front camera of my laptop.)

Individual functions

If you are curious about how each function of the device work, you may want to take a look in this section, where I show snippets of code for this project.

Distance sensing

To control the ultrasonic sensor with arduino It was actually easier than I expected, considering it is the major function of my design. Thanks you tutorials on youtube and the abundance of documentation found on google, I managed to get the grip of it in no time. To measure the distance all I needed was to setup the PIN and call the Serial.begin() function in void setup(), to return the distance value in cm, I used sonar.ping_cm() to do so, after that, just return or store or echo the value as needed.

Timer

For me that was the trickest part of the project, part of it was because I'm not a coder to start with. But implementing a timer with a 4 digit 7 segment display was harder than it seems, espeically when it comes to the wiring part, since I only have one Arduino board, I need to use this electronic in combination with a shift register so it doesn't occupy all the other pins only for display the timer. I did quite a lot of searching and spent quite some time to figure out how it works and the best way to implement the timer without messing up other functions, there also are 2 types of 7 segment display so you need to be careful.

Basically, if you went through the wiring part of the function, the coding is nothing but tedious, where I had to define each numnber for their corresponding led on the display, to put it in a way easier to understanding, the 7 segment display is nothing more than seven led blinks in different combination to display different letters or number, you just have to define each number or letter that you want the display to show.