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I think you should start with some tutorial material on this or other sites. While you're looking for something to build, try to think about the acquisition of useful hand tools. At some point you'll want to get a temperature controlled soldering station. You can try just a soldering iron, but you need to be very careful not to use too much heat when doing that first project.
Robotics is always a cool place to start. You can start as simply as getting a couple motors, a sensor, and a pre-made microcontroller board. You plug everything in, write some code and it runs.
Robotics is always a cool place to start. You can start as simply as getting a couple motors, a sensor, and a pre-made microcontroller board. You plug everything in, write some code and it runs.
By code, I mean prgramming code, software for the microcontroller (a computer on a single chip). It tells the robot what do, for example it makes a signal for the motors to move forward if the sensor reading is saying nothing is in front of it.
Kind of like (in more english terms):
If Sensor_Distance > 10cm then go forward.
If Sensor_Distance < 10cm then stop.
That kind of thing. Exactly what is your background?
well im kinda just a guy looking for something to do and electronics seemed to appear on ask.com... a little low quality i know; but ive did some things at school a few years ago, i know the basic components and what how to follow a circut (if i know the symbols (sorry for the misspelling of circuit (sorry again there)) diagram...
okay i think ive worked out myself how to build one but how do sensors work when they sense something do they like compleat the circuit? or something else?
Well a sensor uses some physical phenomena to discover something about the environment.
The sensor can output the signal in different ways (analog voltage or analog current, or a digital computer signal).
For example, you hook the power wires to the sensor and you hook up the "signal" wire from the sensor to the an analog to digital converter (ADC)attached the computer (a lot of the time the coimputer chip has one built in). All this ADC does is change the a real-life voltage into a bunch of 1s and 0s so the computer's digital circuitry can work with it.
So a distance sensor might output 1V for every meter that it detects an object being in front of it. So if something was 3m away it would put out 3V on the signal line, 1V for every meter. The ADC would take this 3V and change it into a digital signal (a bunch of 1s and 0s) so that the digital computer can work with it.
The sensor could use different methods to output the information. The most common are voltage and digital signal followed by current (other methods exist also). The digital signal is different than the other "analog" methods because it is a signal the computer processor can directly work with and can carry more complex information using only one data line. An analogy might be that instead of dropping 5 balls into a container to tell you that I see 5 apples (analog), I write on a note that says how many apples there are, as well as additional information like the time I saw the apples at and what colour and shape they were. With the note, you could process the information directly instead of having to interpret it and I can also stick more information into that one signal, instead of requiring a separate container of balls to tell you the colour, shape, and how many apples.
right... i think i follow... but like would you set the voltage? or would it come custom set, and what if that 3 volts isnt enough to get it far enough?
The voltage "scaling" factor (like 1V/meter or 1V/degree of temperature) is usually pre-determined by the sensor and sometimes can be tuned to fit your needs, but only up to a limit. This factor is usually on the scale of millivolts. You can also stick amplifiers and stuff so help make the voltage output better fit to the voltage range used by the microcontroller.
How you interpet that voltage is something you do when you write the code to program the software that will run the microcontroller. You can interpret the voltage from the sensor however you want (you could treat 1V = 5m even if the sensor outputs 1V = 1m. It's probably not the most accurate way to go about it though).
A general-purpose microcontroller (the specific term for a computer on one chip, the processor, memory and everything else on one chip) can usually only take 5V maximum (that's the chip's required power supply and for simplicity, 5V is the voltage that represents a digital 1 and 0V represents a digital 0).
So you can see that practicalities come into play here. If you want have a sensor that can measure a very long range, it must divide the 5V total into many very small slices to squeeze the large distance into 5V. If you dont need to measure such a long range, these slices can be bigger. The smaller the slices are, the harder and more expensive it is to accurately measure them (noise also makes it harder to measure very small slices). Also, ADCs have a minimum resolution so if the slices get too small, the ADC can't read that low (ie. if the slices are down to 1mV, but the ADC can only read down to 5mV, then 1,2,3,4 mV will all read as 5mV).
So you can either decrease the sensor's maximum readings or you can use a higher voltage to increase accuracy and easiness to read the voltage, but then you have trade offs for distance (and too high-voltage can't be used by computer-type electronics)
This is something you would write into software. You could wire it with discrete components to make it behave that way, but it's not flexible and very difficult to make changes to.
You would wire up power to the sensor and the microcontroller, then plug the signal wire of the sensor into the microcontroller. The rest is programming so that the microcontroller behaves.
It might look like this image (connect all the powers wires to where they are supposed to go since everything needs power and I got lazy and didn't want to draw all the wires going from the batteries). Power lines are +V and GND
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