School Project: Help needed

All,

Can someone point me to the right direction. For an engineering class,
I must design and create a project to help the blind using
sonar/echolocation. Any websites or any direction at all would be
useful.

Thanks in advance.

Bricket

 

Catch and train a bat.

 

Well, besides catching a bat,you could have a look at

http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/appnotes/xapp364.pdf

Ben

 

That's a pretty broad subject, and not one that you're going to be able
to tackle fully as a class project -- which means that what you're
_really_ being asked to do is some little part of it.

First, I'd listen closely to what the prof has to say -- he may be
giving you the parameters of the project without being explicit about it
(I hate that).

Second, he wants you to do something with SONAR, probably ultrasonic.
I'd web search on SONAR, ultrasonic, possibly 'ultrasonic range finding'.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

 

Here is one with complete plans...

http://www.interq.or.jp/japan/se-inoue/e_psrm.htm

Good luck,
Luhan

 

Thanks..

 

The teacher is interesed, I imagine in organizing the project from
begining to end. Which mean that at least a crude apparatus must be
built and functional. Believe it or not, he would like the thng to have
a speech instead of relying on vibration or intensity of vibration
like some commercial unit have.

 

I wonder if he's asked any of the intended users what *their* preferences
might be. I'd think speech wouldn't be nearly as useful since it's simply so
slow in providing feedback, but I wouldn't really know either.

I have been surprised that you see talking RF power & VSWR meters out there,
and apparently they sell significant quantities!

 

Hi Joel,
Well, a lot of the stuff for the visually impaired finds its way into
the 'normal' population. A few years ago, talking watches and
calculators were all the rage, especially for kids! And, if I am tuning
an RF stage, it can be right handy to be able to see which slug I'm
turning without having to look at the meter...

Charlie

 

Speech is insane for a dumb unit.
If it could say "there is a door to your left" reliably, then maybe not.
But realistically, for a simple unit, all you're going to get is a
range to nearest obstruction, and indication of how much nearby
reflection there is.
Speaking this every second or so is going to be very tiring to listen
to.
Not to mention less usable than vibration, where you can easily turn
your head, and get a scan of the area.

 

I have a suspicion the "requirement" for speech probably is just the
professor's own, uhh... appreciation of speech synthesis or some such.

Many years ago for an opto-electronics lab I built a heartbeat detector based
on an IR LED and phototransistor (you put your finger on it) and a bunch of
fancy op-amps performing low-noise amplification, filtering and detection; it
fed a flashing LED and a beeper every time it detected a beat. I showed it
off at the appointed time, and the main feedback I received was, "nice... but
shouldn't there be a digital readout of beats per minute!" Arrrrggh!

 

You should have added a one minute gate and told him it was for the
blind to count the beeps so they would know their pulse rate. ;-)


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

That would be a simple pressure sensor inserted into the anus of the
seeing eye dog, then into an embedded PC for translation to human speech.