AVOID DINGING YOUR CAR!! Use a PI to know how far YOUR CAR is away from an OBSTACLE!!

I recently bought a new car and it's a VERY tight squeeze fitting it into my garage!! I always have to park it VERY close to a shelving unit at the back of the garage in order to still be able to close the garage door.
As such, I wanted to build something that could show me a very clear display of how close my car was to the shelves. I then found I could buy an UltraSonic distance sensor and a small LED dot matrix display that could be driven from the Raspberry PI.
In this video, I take you through how to set all of this up so that you can know EXACTLY how far your car is away from objects YOU want to AVOID!!
Links to things you see in the video (shop around!! These are just what I used!!):
* Raspberry PI Zero W - shop.pimoroni.com/products/ra...
* PI Zero case - www.amazon.co.uk/Yunseity-Ras...
* LED Matrix - www.amazon.co.uk/Youmile-Cont...
* US-100 UltraSonic Sensor - thepihut.com/products/us-100-...
* Jumper wires (F-F) - www.amazon.co.uk/Dupont-Femal...
* Jumper wires (M-F) - www.amazon.co.uk/sourcing-map...
Useful links:
GitHub: github.com/jeffspiinthesky/di...
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - Titles
01:04 - Like / Subscribe / Notify / Comment
01:40 - Project Intro
02:55 - Kit list
05:58 - Install PI OS and increase swap / avoid kernel panic / enable UART
09:24 - Enable SPI
10:13 - Set up hardware
11:47 - Code walkthrough
17:08 - Get code on to PI and set up runtime environment
18:35 - Run the code
19:01 - Demo
20:08 - Run software as a service (autorun on reboot)
21:13 - Outro
22:07 - Closing titles
Equipment used:
* Canon M100 camera with 13-55mm kit lens
* Shure MV7 mic
* Elgato collapsable green screen
* Neewer GL1 Pro keylight
* Nanlite Pavotube 30C lights
* Original video capture using OBS
* All video editing using Kdenlive
* All image editing using GIMP

[@philspencelayh5464]

Interesting project I've got some of those transducers about I'll give it a try. Many years ago I made an analogue motion detector using similar transducers to do with the moving object creating "interference paterns" . I'd bet someone really switched on with PIs could do something more up to date. I too use a tennis ball and string, a power saving version.

[@jeffs_piinthesky]

That sounds really interesting!!! Not 100% sure these little gizmos would be accurate enough for it though...I did know a guy once who reverse engineered an old Xbox Kinect sensor to do analytics on his cycling style (he was a borderline pro cyclist) to monitor airflow etc...it was fascinating.

[@acubley]

I've always just used a tennis ball stapled to a string hanging from the ceiling. :-)

[@jeffs_piinthesky]

That's the "analogue solution" 🤣

[@philspencelayh5464]

​@@jeffs_piintheskyI prefer to call it appropriate technology

[@richards7909]

And with a little more modification you can check if your car is in the garage or not :D

[@jeffs_piinthesky]

Absolutely!! Pressure sensors on the floor, AI object detection from a camera, the sky's the limit!! 😃

[@JurassicCorgi]

I have the same problem! Trying to guess if the car is in the garage is always a pain and mine doesn't have the cool whizzy sensors.

[@jeffs_piinthesky]

The sensors are great...but very screamy....which I guess is the point *lol*