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Raspberry Pi 4 Setup with 2 Ultrasonic Sensors
Inspiration
As teenagers, it is unfortunate to see other young people like us become victims of accidents caused due to distracted driving. We decided to create a system that would help combat distracted driving through the use of hands free audio controls.
What it does
The media player enables the user to pause/play, skip tracks or fast forward tracks and return to previous track or rewind with the simple hand gestures. To operate this, the user would never have to look away from the road.
How I built it
Our project was configured and setup from a Raspberry Pi in order to create an operating system and environment for the media player. Once we had that setup, we configured the circuit which incorporated two ultrasonic sensors and connected it to the Raspberry Pi. We then coded the sensors in python to recognize different gestures from different directions. Finally, we setup a keyboard and then programmed keys of the keyboard into our python program so that the gestures would stimulate a keyboard input and perform the required task on the media player.
Challenges I ran into
One of the challenges that we ran into was having the sensors accurately recognize the different gestures. Since the sensors do not operate perfectly, it took an extensive amount of trial and error, debugging and various sensor placement techniques to get the sensors working appropriately. Additionally, we had issues formatting the SD card and configuring the Raspbian operating system, and wireless internet. However, after a short while we were able to do so be watching tutorials and reading online articles.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Our group is proud of being able to configure and setup the Raspberry Pi with none of us having any previous experience. It involved several trips to the parts room and an extensive amount of research by the entire team. When we had mastered the Raspberry Pi and understood how it worked, being able to troubleshoot a problem with a completely new level of difficulty was even more rewarding which was making the two ultrasonic sensors work together and work accurately. This not only involved a lot of debugging, but also a lot of circuit design decisions. Overall, we are proud that we started climbing a mountain that we kept climbing faster as it got steeper and eventually made it to the top.
What I learned
We learned the vast capabilities of a credit sized computer known as the Raspberry Pi. From setting up the operating system to connecting the components in the circuit to the computer helped us gain a deeper understanding of how many modern systems work. We realized that most systems have computers built into them and they're very similar to what we worked with.
What's next for Motion Controlled Media Player
Throughout this whole process, we learned one very important thing. The capabilities of systems like the Raspbian Pi are endless. Creating something that was just a though and bringing it into reality is one day portrayed to us the amount we can do if we had more time. This includes adding another dimension of motion to enable more motion commands (triangulation), eventually we could even make something similar to a Wii. Additionally, we could have taken the media player a step beyond by using API's like Voiceflow to use voice recognition as another means of operating the media player.
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