PROJECT 87 - Capacitive Turbulence Sensor Demo + Tutorial

Hello all, sorry for the long hiatus on uploading! Today I bring you a homemade presence/object/people detection sensor you can easily make at home! See materials list below!

This "Capacitive Turbulence" sensor allows a microcontroller (or robot in our case) to detect people or objects without having to make physical contact of any kind! This is especially useful, as we may implement this type of simple and affordable technology on our anthropomorphic robots (including Freddy and co.), to provide them with a type of "sensing self-awareness", so-to-speak.

Materials required:

• (1) Arduino Microcontroller Board
• USB Cable and Computer with Arduino IDE Installed
• (2) Solid-Core Wires (available from any electronics store)
• Five Minutes of your time :)

DOWNLOAD SKETCH/PROGRAM: http://hostcode.sourceforge.net/view/5920

Step 1: Strip one end on each of your two wires, to allow them to be plugged into your board. Twist both cables together, leaving the end untwisted.

Step 2: Plug one wire into GND, and the other into any Analog input (use Analog 3 for the demo sketch).

Step 3: Ensuring your board is connected over USB, upload the sketch to your board, and open the Serial Plotter. This will display a graph of the readings from your sensor.

Optional: If you prefer, open the Serial Monitor to get numerical readings from the sensor. NOTE: The baud rate is set to 250000, to allow for super-fast readings. Ensure your Serial monitor or plotter is set to the same baud rate.

A video explaining the recent changes to the channel, as well as the acquisition of Project 87 by Anthrobotics, will be released this Saturday. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7cGhCliDjY