The Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout board is an excellent way to get started with GPS and Arduino. Adafruit does an excellent job providing tutorials and code for the user. I would suggest checking out their provided tutorials and code before looking elsewhere.
Joysticks have become a common tool among various devices, such as gaming controllers. They can be an interesting addition to projects as well. Joysticks are fairly simply components that use two potentiameters to give the readings from two axes. They may also include a button to see if the user…
Who hasn’t wanted to monitor what goes on when they aren’t there. When I was little, I was always curious about whether or not anyone was going into my room and would have loved a camera monitoring system. It may even be a good idea to have a simple security setup for an apartment.
An IMU is something used to detect primarily orientation, but is a general term for an Inertial Measurement Unit. Needless to say, they can provide some vital information for mobile robots. In particular, flying robots need them since there is no way to guess orientation using wheel encoders.
Cameras can be used in numerous applications: survellience, hobbies, robotics, etc. They are very useful to see what is happening when a robot is moving on its own or even to just have fun with.
Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensors are used to detect motion based on the infrared heat in the surrounding area. This makes them a popular choice when building a system to detect potential intruders or people in general. These sensors can take for 10-60 seconds to warm up, so try to avoid motion during that time.
This is a longer range version of the GP2Y0D810 Infrared Sensor. They’re about 15$, and work fairly well for distances between 0.5 meters and 1.5 meters. It is important to note that the distance to voltage curve is not linear. So, if you want the real distance, measured in mm, you’ll need to…
Infrared sensors are a form of distance sensors. They tend to be more susceptible to inaccuracies. This is because they send out infrared light and wait for the light to tell distance. Certain colors, especially black, absorb some of the infrared light and may return a false reading.
The HC-SR04 distance sensor is an ultrasonic sensor that is used for distance measurements.
Parallax’s Ping))) sensor is an ultrasonic sensor that is used for distance measurements.
