Crafting

At this stage, we will try to build a working model of the concept discussed so far. We will try to build a feedback system that detects the obstacles nearby and give appropriate feedback to the user.

We will use Arduino and an ultra-sonic sensor to build the system. Note that this will only be a working rig to show the proof of concept and the feedback loop is a makeshift one. The actual feedback we plan to have is most likely going to be vibrating feedback. The light and sound feedback is too jarring but good for testing and is hence used here.

Working Principle: 

An ultrasonic sensor uses SONAR to determine the distance of an object just like the bats do. Active ultrasonic sensors generate high-frequency sound waves and evaluate the echo which is received back by the sensor, measuring the time interval between sending the signal and receiving the echo to determine the distance to an object. The operation is not affected by sunlight or black material, although acoustically, soft materials like cloth can be difficult to detect. Lucky for us, most obstacles on the roads don't have cloth-like materials.

We build an Arduino circuit using an ultrasonic sensor and buzzer to demonstrate the working principle. 

We used Arduino to generate a trigger pulse which is used by the ultrasonic module to generate a high-frequency pulse that travels with the speed of sound and echo is received by the sensor. using the time delay we calculate the distance between sensor and obstacle in the Arduino and accordingly activate the buzzer.

working circuit

The following clips are taking from our testing process.

The testing of the shoe model seems to work very well as shown.