Tutorial – Parallax Ping))) Ultrasonic Sensor

Sense distance with ultrasonic sensors in chapter forty-five of a series originally titled “Getting Started/Moving Forward with Arduino!” by John Boxall – a series of articles on the Arduino universe. The first chapter is here, the complete series is detailed here.

Updated 05/02/2013

Whilst being a passenger in a vehicle with a ‘reversing sensors’, I became somewhat curious as to how the sensors operated and how we can make use of them. So for this chapter we will investigate an ultrasonic sensor from Parallax called the Ping)))™ Ultrasonic Distance Sensor. It can measure distances between ~2cm and ~3m in length. Here is our example sensor:

(Memories of Number Five …)

Parallax have done a lot of work, the board contains not just the bare sensor hardware but controller circuitry as well:

Which is great as it leaves us with only three pins – 5V, GND and signal. More on those in a moment, but first…

How does it work?

Good question. The unit sends out an ultrasonic (a sound that has a frequency which is higher than can be heard by the human ear) burst of sound from one transducer (the round silver things) and waits for it bounce off an object and return – which is detected by the other transducer. The board will then return to us the period of time taken for this process to take, which we can interpret to determine the distance between the sensor and the object from which the ultrasonic sound bounced from.

The Ping))) only measures a distance when requested – to do this we send a very short HIGH pulse of five microseconds to the signal pin. After a brief moment a pulse will come from the board on the same signal pin. The period of this second pulse is the amount of time the sound took to travel out and back from the sensor – so we divide it by two to calculate the distance. Finally, as the the speed of sound is 340 metres per second, the Arduino sketch can calculate the distance to whatever units required.

It may sound complex, but it is not –  so let’s run through the theory of operation with an example. Using our digital storage oscillscope we have measured the waveforms on the signal pin during a typical measurement. Consider the following example of measuring a distance of 12cm (click image to enlarge):

You can see the 5uS pulse in the centre and the pulse returned from the sensor board on the right. Now to zoom in on the returned pulse (click image to enlarge):

Without being too picky the pulse is roughly 720uS (microseconds) long – the duration of ultrasonic sound’s return trip from the sensor board. So we divide this by two to find the time to travel the distance – 360uS. Recall the speed of sound is 340 metres per second – which converts to 29.412 uS per centimetre. So, 360uS divided by 29.412 uS gives 12.239902081… centimetres. Rounded that gives us 12 centimetres. Easy!

Finally, there are some limitations to using the Ping))) sensor. Download the data sheet (pdf) and read pages three to five for information on how to effectively mount the sensor and the sensitivity results from factory resting.

How do we use it with Arduino?

As described previously we first need to send a 5uS pulse, then listen for the return pulse. The following sketch does just that, then converts the data to centimetres and displays the result on the serial monitor. The code has been commented to explain each step.

And the results of some hand-waving in the serial monitor:

So there you have it – you can now measure distance with a degree of accuracy. However that image above isn’t very exciting – instead let’s use a 7-segment display shield to get things up in lights. The shield uses the NXP SAA1064 LED display driver IC (explained quite well here). You can download the demonstration sketch from here. And now for the video:

So there you have it – now the use of the sensor is up to your imagination. Stay tuned using the methods below to see what we get up to with this sensor in the future.