Student Projects

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Introduction

With the NI myDAQ and LabVIEW I created myRangeScanner.

This is a system to demonstrate how Roboticists overcome the limitations of only having one sensor to sense a large area of the real world, using a servo motor to rotation the sensing angle a full 180 degrees.

How it works

It uses an Ifrared proximity sensor and a small hobby servo motor to take a scan of 180 degrees in front of it, creating an XY graph to represent what it can 'see'.

The VI has been created using the NI DAQmx driver API. First, the two DAQmx Tasks are set-up, one for the Voltage input from the IR sensor, and another for the counter output that will serve as the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal to tell the servo motor where to move to.

These tasks are fed into a For Loop where, on each iteration fo the loop, a voltage is read in from the IR sensor and added to an array, and the servo motor is given the next position to move to. Then the array of voltages, along with the array of servo motor angle when they were read in, are passed into another subVI that creates the XY Plot.

Video Demonstration