Planet Arduino

After obtaining an industrial distance sensor, TUENHIDIY decided to use it as the basis for an interesting visual indicator.

The device communicates with an Arduino Uno via an RS-485 module, and outputs distance values in the form of a 9 x 14 pixel display made out of discreet LEDs soldered onto an LoL Shield.

As shown in the video be low, it does a good job of sensing how far an object is from it on a table, and the 126 LEDs provide a nice brilliant display. 

Code for the build can be found on GitHub if you’d like to make something similar. Seeing as though the sensor used here will set you back close to $1,000, you may want to also consider alternatives like an HC-SR04 ultrasonic module instead! 

Wanting to control a split flap display that was not near a computer [Tom] looked to a common solution for communicating over distances not practical for I2C or SPI. He developed his own hardware and packet format using the RS-485 protocol.

This is part of a larger project he has been working on to feed data to a split flap display that he plans to hang on the wall. RS-485 is designed to work over long distances and overcome noise issues. The core of the communications system is the board seen on the left. It uses a MAX1483 chip, a pair of RJ45 jacks for Ethernet cables, and two terminal blocks for power and communications. There are a few nice things about this. The board acts as a pass-through making it easy to chain nodes together, and the data structure is completely independent of the hardware itself. Because of this [Tom] developed his own packet format that will be a bit more resilient than the Arduino networking scheme we looked at the other day.