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Not gone. And not forgotten.
With all this talk of golf and visits to Whitefields Golf Course it'd be easy to lose sight of why the game scoring device idea came about - to provide a device for keeping score during games played at the Brighton and Hove Petanque Club. When not working on the GLCD interface (details to be posted here soon, when it's finally working properly and not just outputting garbage to the screen) and while waiting for some more etchant to build a breakout board, yet more exciting ideas have been spewing forth - particularly with regards a dedicated Petanque scoring device.
By removing all golf-related code, the microcontroller has enough free program memory to fit a digital distance measuring module. Like most search results for "measure distance microcontroller" on The Big G the most obvious solution is ultrasound.
I've investigated this quite a bit. The problem with using the speed of sound to measure distance is that it's not constant. It changes with temperature. And with Petanque being an outdoor game, this could be quite an issue, as the accuracy of the measurements would drift. The other issue is that the ultrasound receiver is quite bulky and not very accurate because of the wide response angle, so after much umming and ahhing, ultrasound was eventually ruled out.
Laser/radio measuring was quickly ruled out, as I couldn't get a microcontroller to run anywhere near fast enough to measure responses at the speed of light.
So it was back to more traditional methods of measuring distance - namely a tape measure. Now that's not very 21st century is it?
Thanks once again to Robot Steve and some rotary encoders from Farnell, a solution is on the way: a motorised tape measure - using the device interface buttons, a tape measure can extend/retract over a 1m distance, while the rotary encoders measure the distance and display it on the GLCD screen. Pretty cool huh?
And all made possible thanks to a hacked micro servo, similar to the 360 degree continuous rotation servo from botBuilder.co.uk
Simply put, the servo controls the top of a pair of rollers, while the encoder is attached to the bottom roller. As the servo turns, a tape measure is squeezed between the two, and extends/retracts accordingly. The rotary encoder keeps track of how many revolutions (or fractions of a revolution) have taken place, and this can be used to calculate and display the distance travelled on the screen.
It sounds pretty cool in theory. Pictures and videos will be posted here to show it working (or not) in practice....
By removing all golf-related code, the microcontroller has enough free program memory to fit a digital distance measuring module. Like most search results for "measure distance microcontroller" on The Big G the most obvious solution is ultrasound.
I've investigated this quite a bit. The problem with using the speed of sound to measure distance is that it's not constant. It changes with temperature. And with Petanque being an outdoor game, this could be quite an issue, as the accuracy of the measurements would drift. The other issue is that the ultrasound receiver is quite bulky and not very accurate because of the wide response angle, so after much umming and ahhing, ultrasound was eventually ruled out.
Laser/radio measuring was quickly ruled out, as I couldn't get a microcontroller to run anywhere near fast enough to measure responses at the speed of light.
So it was back to more traditional methods of measuring distance - namely a tape measure. Now that's not very 21st century is it?
Thanks once again to Robot Steve and some rotary encoders from Farnell, a solution is on the way: a motorised tape measure - using the device interface buttons, a tape measure can extend/retract over a 1m distance, while the rotary encoders measure the distance and display it on the GLCD screen. Pretty cool huh?
And all made possible thanks to a hacked micro servo, similar to the 360 degree continuous rotation servo from botBuilder.co.uk
Simply put, the servo controls the top of a pair of rollers, while the encoder is attached to the bottom roller. As the servo turns, a tape measure is squeezed between the two, and extends/retracts accordingly. The rotary encoder keeps track of how many revolutions (or fractions of a revolution) have taken place, and this can be used to calculate and display the distance travelled on the screen.
It sounds pretty cool in theory. Pictures and videos will be posted here to show it working (or not) in practice....
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