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……