Chapter 2. Ultrasonic Parking Assistant

In this chapter, we'll learn how to use the BeagleBone Black to implement a park assistant. We're going to use an ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance between our car and the garage wall, and some LEDs to give a feedback of the car position to the driver in order to avoid collisions.

We'll see how to set up the ultrasonic range sensor in two different manners, using different interfaces to get the data in order to resolve a problem in two different ways and obtain two different system configurations.

The basic of functioning

The project is really simple, even if it needs some electronic skills in order to manage the sensor output. Basically, our BeagleBone Black just needs to periodically poll the ultrasonic sensor output and then turn on the LEDs according to the distance from the wall: as level indicator lower is the distance and more LEDs are turned on.

Setting up the hardware

As just stated, in this project we're...