radar

gui for CS 5422 radar project

You should edit the variable MAX_RANGE so that the radar screen shows interesting results. In other words, although the range finder has a maximum range of 5000mm, if most of your objects are a couple of cm away, shorten the range to a few cm so that you it's easier to see what's going on in the interesting region where there are actual objects.

You may also need to adjust the portName variable on line 25, especially if you have multiple devices connected to your machine. You can either adjust the index into the Serial.list(), or you can find the string name for the serial port you are using (see tools>port setting in the arduino IDE).

In order to run this, you need to download the Processing IDE from https://processing.org/. Then load your sketch onto the arduino and start the radar moving. Then open and run this code in the Processing IDE. It should connect to the serial port that the arduino is sending data to, and display the data on the screen.

To test if you've got it set up right, the following arduino sketch should send data to the serial terminal that should be readable by the gui. In particular it should look as if there is an object 2000mm away all the way around.

int i = 0;
int inc = 1;

void setup() {
    Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
    delay(100);
    if (i == 180)
        inc = -1;
    if (i == 0)
        inc = 1;

    Serial.print(i);
    i += inc;
    Serial.print(",");
    Serial.println(2000);
}

This was adapted from http://howtomechatronics.com/arduino-radar/.