I created my project to help people with restricted vision to have more safety on their everyday activities. It is a microcontroller-based gadget to help people with low device is meant to be put in a cap and utilizes an Ultrasonic sensor to measure the distance to incoming objects that are on their way within a proximity range set via Bluetooth, a vibration motor, and a loudspeaker. As the obstacles get closer this device alarms the user by either a beep sound or vibration. The closer it gets the faster it beeps.
The microcontroller used was the BGM22 Explorer Kit (BGM-EK4314A) from Silicon Labs. It also uses a buzzer, the Ultrasonic Ranging Module HC-SR04, a speaker, two buttons and a vibro motor. The Ultrasonic Module needs 5V to be powered as the batteries provide only 3V but because of the DC/DC converter it is boosted up to 5V.
| Schematic | Assembly | Front | ||
For this project, when the on/off button was pressed, you can see the distance measurement by TeraTerm, as the distance gets closer than 150cm the pace of the beep or vibration would become faster, and when it reaches 100cm it would accelerate too. These two distance thresholds can be changed via Bluetooth by the App EFR Connect by Silicon Labs. This device is meant to be put on a cap so the user can prevent obstacles of the height of his head when walking during his everyday activities as the canes cannot be pointed forward or up to the head height.
There was a previous version of this project created by me in 2017 that made to the news TV, it was simpler but it was already tested by a user which really liked it, according to him, hitting your head on trees and open garage doors was a issue that he faced frequently when walking around.
I really liked the fact that I could develop my project to a better version during this class, it was something I wanted to do since my first prototype at 2017 and I could do it in one semester. As I didn’t get to complete Object Oriented Programming and Assembly Language class it was hard for me to get used to the c language and all the documentation knowledge needed to build each function, but I got a lot of help from Dr. Sergei and at the end we could get it done. It was a great experience as it was the first time, I had contact with C language used to build devices, so it really opened my eyes on how many things can be built from scratch.