Distance Alert – Keep a safe distance

Keep your social distance with an audible and visual warning that tells you when you are getting too close to a shop counter, a kiosk or a service window. The kit is made up of a screen-printed plexiglass panel, a pre-drilled enclosure and all the electronic parts to be wired up.

The device is built around a tiny Arduino-compatible board called the μchip (part no. UCHIPWSH), which reads the distance signal from a small SONAR module ( part no. MISDIST04) and, from that reading, builds a colour combination into a data string that it sends to the NeoPixel strip at the foot of a plexiglass sheet, which acts as the display. If the distance signal shows there is not enough room (less than 100 cm) it also drives a buzzer that sounds an audible alarm while the NeoPixel LEDs glow red; where the distance is judged wide enough (more than 120 cm) the buzzer stays silent and the RGB LED strip shows green. There is a third threshold that turns the RGB strip yellow when the distance is more than 100 cm and less than 120 cm.

The full article on the “Distance Alert” was published in issue 246 of Elettronica In.

• Threshold distances:
  – red < 100 cm
  – yellow >100 cm <120 cm
  – green >120 cm