Connecting Ping sensors to a Propeller Project Board
doug.taylor
Posts: 31
in Robotics
Preface: I'm not an engineer, pls have patience.
I would like to get a Propeller Project Board and have it connect to 7 Ping Ultrasonic sensors, 11 Ping Laser Rangefinder sensors and have two connections to a Dual H-Bridge Motor Controller. I might also connect it to a voltage sensor. I will need many 3 pin connectors in the prototype area. I suppose I will need a 5V regulator for all these connections.
Any advise?
I wish Parallax or someone would make a breakout board for the Propeller that accepted 3 Pin wires for each IO. That would be cool.
Doug
I would like to get a Propeller Project Board and have it connect to 7 Ping Ultrasonic sensors, 11 Ping Laser Rangefinder sensors and have two connections to a Dual H-Bridge Motor Controller. I might also connect it to a voltage sensor. I will need many 3 pin connectors in the prototype area. I suppose I will need a 5V regulator for all these connections.
Any advise?
I wish Parallax or someone would make a breakout board for the Propeller that accepted 3 Pin wires for each IO. That would be cool.
Doug
Comments
This is something that would be relatively easy to do on a perfboard in conjunction with any of the Propeller boards. The Propeller project board USB would be the best choice imo as it has a large prototyping area, so no need for a perfboard.
Then do more planning.
When you think you're ready to fire up the soldering iron, turn it off and plan some more.
I am a very big fan of a freeware program called Inkscape (vector graphics program). I frequently use it for project planning. You could, for example import an image of the PPB and scale it to size. Then you could build and place images of your 3-pin headers. With that many connections you may want to use color-coded pin-headers to create your connection; that way your ground pins could be black, your 5v pins red, and the signal pins white or yellow. Like these:
-- https://www.pololu.com/product/2665
If you give the Inkscape route a try, put the board on the lowest layer and lock it, Put headers and wires of separate layers, too.
Have fun!
Jon - As a programmer of many, many years, I appreciate the multi-planning philosophy. I will definitely employ it. Thanks also for the Inkscape link. It looks promising. I really like the idea of the colored pin-headers. I will definitely make use of them.
kwinn - I will go ahead and use the prototype area. I will also use a regulated 5V power to the board so that I can just us VIN for the 3 pin connectors. But, wouldn't it be easy to build a simple board that connected to the QuickStart header socket that would have a 3 pin connection for each IO pin of the Propeller? I think such a board would be very useful.
Thanks again
Doug
If you already have a quick start board then it makes sense to use it, as well as using the header socket to mount a board with the 3 pin servo connections and the regulators to provide the 3.3V or 5V the pings require. Not sure what the idle and active current requirements are for each ping but typically they are activated sequentially so the peak current should not be too high.
Using a pefboard for prototyping should be fairly simple since the I/O's are on sequential pins. Place extra long pins in the center of the perfboard to plug in to the header socket and protrude above the perfboard, and regular length pins to the left and right of the socket to provide GND and Vin.
I use a ten pin ribbon cable to connect the I/O pins to the PCB and I connect power and ground according to voltage requirements.
I also made one with 0.2" screw terminals. I attached layout images of both boards along with a zipped folder of the Gerber files. You submit either zip folder to OSHPark.com and have three boards made for $5.15 or $5.05.
I connect the ribbon cable to my Quickstart board using sets of male headers soldered to the extra holes.
There's a limitation of having to leave four I/O pins without header pins between the groups of ten pins. I often use some other connection strategy to access these four pins. Nere's an example of using perf board.
I initially used these boards for a hexapod with lots of servos but I've been surprised how often I use them now that I have several sets.