I am building my first robot and its going great.
It is a robot car kit with 4 cheap motors, a dual channel motor driver, an Arduino and a Ultrasonic sensor. I have the motors running and the wheel decoders are pulsing. I am now looking into interfacing with the sensor.
This sensor emits a pulse train when you request a measurement. The length of the pulse train corresponds to the distance of the detected object. The max pulse train length is 50 milliseconds.
I could write an ISR in the arduino that reads this pulse train and do it all in software. I could also add some hardware to unload this boring task from my Arduino.
I have looked into counter IC's. But I would like something that counts the pulses and can be interface with some sort of bus standard (I2C/SPI/CAN - as simple as possible). I have not found a chip that can do that yet. A simple circuit is also fine - doesn't have to be all in one chip.
Anybody has some suggestions?
Thanx.