Hi there,
New to all of this, but have a plan, however I need to ask a few questions that are not really addressed in the product page of these two products before I order them. Any help appreciated.
Can the “Ping Ultrasonic Range Sensor” be connected to one of the SSC-32’s inputs and subsequently read from a pc connected to the SSC-32’s serial port?
Incidentally, what kind of serial cable will I need to connect the SSC-32 to a PC, regular or null?
Thanks,
Martin
Denmark
A regular serial cable I think. 
Thanks Any ideas about the sensor input?
I can’t think of any way you could directly meet the timing requirements of a ping)) through the ssc-32 without doing something in the ssc-32 firmware itself. even using 115Kbaud on the serial lines the fastest you can poll it would be several hundred microseconds between samples. even then there would be a lot of jitter in your response. of course if you are just looking for a crude threshold of a foot or so resolution… maybe.
I kind of had a hunch that something like that would be the case, and I would of course prefer a little more precision. Since I plan on hooking the SSC-32 up to a gumstix computer, are there any dedicated sensor input boards that I can connect via either serial or bluetooth like the SSC-32 servo controller, OR a range finder sensor that will work independently of my hardware and just report a range to me whenever I ask for it, preferably through the SSC-32?
I’m not looking for a guaranteed 50 range reports per second, I can basically live with a much smaller resolution (1-2/sec), but precision down to a couple of inches would be nice, since I plan to use it in concert with a gps module to map surroundings. Price is obviously also an issue
Sharp GP2D12 will output an analog voltage proportional to the distance of an object.
lynxmotion.com/Product.aspx? … tegoryID=8
It can connect to the SSC-32 and be accessed through the Query command. Or it may connect directly to the gumstix thing, which I’m not real familiar with.
if the GP2D12 doesn’t have enough range you may want to search out sources for some of the other Devantech SRF modules. I know at least one is I2C based (SRF02 maybe?) which may play nicely with the gumstix thing.
Again the product website comes up a little short, what kind of range does the GP2D12 have? A good 2-3 feet with a resolution of 2 inches or so would be well within the goals of my application.
According to the spec sheet, the detecting distance is 10 to 80cm.
datasheetarchive.com/search.php?q=GP2D12&sType=part
A quick google returns the datasheet which has a graph showing the useful range is about 9cm out to around 60cm or so.
Thanks all for the useful information, didn’t think to look for a spec sheet to be honest, sorry to cause a bother in that respect
I think I have alle the information I need right now to make an informed decision on the hardware I’ll need. Thanks again.
If you click on the [more info] button and scroll down the range is listed as 10cm to 80cm. We will see about adding the full specs for it though.
Hey Beth, nudge nudge… lol
The below ultrasonic might be of interest as it appears to have an analog output that could be read by the ssc-32.
There is the SRF02, SRF08, SRF10, and SRF235 Ultrasonic I2C sensors. The SRF235 has quite a bit narrower a beam pattern though, so is recommended to be used along with a wider beam sensor like one of the others. The SRF02 uses a single transducer for send and receive (and is the least expensive of all them), so does not have the range of the SRF08 or SRF10 which have two transducers (one to send, one to receive). The SRF08 has an added front light sensor. All of them are sold by Acroname.
8-Dale
