Ultrasonic-Based Distance Detector
A brief explanation on the design, test and development of a simple distance detector based on ultrasonic transducers is provided. This project was carried on along with a professor from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, as an improvement of an Analog Circuits subject’s laboratory design.
The device’s principle of foundation lies on deriving the distance at which we’re pointing to as a function of the time elapsed between an emission and detection of a signal. Further detail is properly provided in an specific section.
The design consists of two main units. First, an excitation phase in which a burst-like square signal is generated using a microcontroller in order to send periodical signals from a transducer transmisor. Second, an acconditioning and processing phase is required to determine whether a detection has taken place on the reciever transducer. The latter usually implies an amplification phase, as we will analyze, and at the very end a comparator module to translate the information into a binary format.