Demand Peripherals     Robotics and Automation Made Easy

PING4: Quad Ping))) Interface

The PING4 peripheral connect to up to four Parallax Ping))) ultrasonic distance sensors. The PING4 peripheral uses the GPIO4 card.

 

Hardware:

The quad Parallax Ping))) peripherals uses the four bidirectional I/O pins on a GPIO4 card to control up to four Parallax Ping))) sensors. Typically you would use the pin header version of the GPIO4 card and would connect +5 Volts and ground to the auxiliary power connector.

 

Resources:

Resources for the in4 peripheral include a read-only data register and a read-write configuration register to determine which pins are monitored for changes.

distance :sensor ID and Distance.
Distance is a read-only resource that works with pccat. The stream of data is line oriented and each line of output has a digit that indicates the sensor number followed by the distance given in units of one-tenth of an inch. A distance of zero indicates that the sensor is not connected or is not responding. Typical output from the distance resource might appear as:

     0 1055
     1 55
     2 0
     3 1848
     0 1094

enable : enable or disable individual sensors.
The enable resource takes a single hexadecimal character terminated by a newline. The LSB of the enable register corresponds to the lowest numbered sensor, sensor ID 0. A set bit enables the sensor and a cleared bit disables it. At start-up all sensors are disabled.

NOTE: Only enable active sensors. The output can stop if a sensor is not present or stops responding.

 

Examples:

Enable the first two sensors and start monitoring the reported distances.

      pcset ping4 enable 3
      pccat ping4 distance