I finally received my Arduino board and a Parralax Ping Ultrasonic sensor, together with a few bits and bobs such as wires and a solderless breadboard. Having no previous experience of how to wire up electronics and having never seen a solderless breadboard before I did feel a little in over my head, but to my surprise……… it was easy to wire up!
My reason for wanting to use an ultrasonic sensor for my project is so that I can detect the audiences’ movement. Movement is a very important factor within the theoretical side of my practice as our movement through the non-place has a predominant affect on how we define it as a space.
Here’s a picture of the setup below:
The Arduino website has a good amount of documentation to on both hardware and software to get you up and running. There is also a good community who seem happy to share their knowledge within the forum pages.
I downloaded the Ultrasonic code from the website and uploaded it to the board, I ran the serial monitor within the Arduino environment and the code seemed to work as described as the sensor was reading a distance back to the computer. Below is a video of me moving the sensor to and from my computer to demonstrate this:
The challenge now is to get the Arduino to communicate with Pure Data and run a series of tests to begin to work out how this project can be realised with the best possible functionality.
I’ve got a feeling that this next process is not going to be as straight forward……
