"Arduino Playground - Components." Arduino - HomePage. Web. 02 Feb. 2011.
Variable Resistors
A resistor may have one or more fixed tapping points so that the resistance can be changed by moving the connecting wires to different terminals. Some wirewound power resistors have a tapping point that can slide along the resistance element, allowing a larger or smaller part of the resistance to be used.
Where continuous adjustment of the resistance value during operation of equipment is required, the sliding resistance tap can be connected to a knob accessible to an operator. Such a device is called a rheostat and has two terminals.
Potentiometers
A common element in electronic devices is a three-terminal resistor with a continuously adjustable tapping point controlled by rotation of a shaft or knob. These variable resistors are known as potentiometers when all three terminals are present, since they act as a continuously adjustable voltage divider. A common example is a volume control for a radio receiver.
Accurate, high-resolution panel-mounted potentiometers (or "pots") have resistance elements typically wirewound on a helical mandrel, although some include a conductive-plastic resistance coating over the wire to improve resolution. These typically offer ten turns of their shafts to cover their full range. They are usually set with dials that include a simple turns counter and a graduated dial. Electronic analog computers used them in quantity for setting coefficients, and delayed-sweep oscilloscopes of recent decades included one on their panels.
Sooooooo I was quite excited after learning about all these sensors last class. I personally picked up a sonar sensor and it got me thinking. I began researching some of the ways people have used sensors like this one.
this first video shows how a sensor can react to motion and cause LEDs to light up. Pretty basic, but it's different than what we saw in class since Nick used the light sensor to draw digitally instead of getting a physical output. The sensor that is being used in this (and the next two videos) is a PIR motion sensor. You can get them for around about $8 here:
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/tiny-pir-motion-sensor-module-p-277.html
I thought this second one was cool for two reasons. First is that the author is a student, so that's kind of cool to see how other students have dealt with arduino based projects. Second is that the purpose of this project is for a safety purpose. Being alerted that someone is behind you could be an extremely useful tool for people walking alone at night, etc. It's interesting how that could be utilized in the real world.
this one is also really cool. it obviously uses more than one sensor, but it's tracking motion and having a device follow it. Pretty cool stuff.
So that motion sensor is really cool, but the one I picked up from class is actually a sonar sensor. So I did a bit of looking and found this video that uses a sonar sensor (though it's not the same one I have)
This is really cool because it allows for distance calculation instead of simply movement. This is a really intriguing idea to me and it's exciting to see how quickly the sensor can take in the distance information (see end of that video)
My preliminary ideas relating to this brief is to use some kind of motion sensor to detect the location of something and feed back an output of either sound or light that can essentially be used to guide the user in navigation. I think it would be really cool to force users to try and move through some kind of obstacle with only sensory information as directional feedback. My instinctual hesitation is that I would need more than one sensor to accomplish this on a big enough scale, but it's all rough ideation for now.
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