Speed Trap- Ultrasonic Style

Dan has been giving E12 some NXT tasks to round out his school day. Some of you long time readers might remember the speed trap E12 made with the light sensors the last time. He measured the velocity of a marble moving down a track. His current task is to create a speed trap using an ultrasonic sensor which detects motion. This time a marble will be too small, but he will use a larger ball that he'll kick toward the sensor to get a read on the speed of the object coming toward it.

The brain is at the back and is hooked together with the ultrasonic sensor which is right up in the front left hand corner of the picture. The sensor will be triggered by the movement of the object coming toward it. The velocity should show on the screen of the brain. How cool is that?

This is the start of the program E12 is writing for his ultrasonic speed trap. NXT uses a "drag and drop" format for programming the "brain" that you frame with LEGOS in a robot.

We'll see if it works when he is finished programming it. However, the batteries in the bricks are dead so he'll need to juice them up again before giving it a test run.