Mini-Project Assignment

The purpose behind this project was to test one of my thesis concepts. In my thesis work I am exploring the issues of safe driving in the elder population. Based in the research done thus far, I have started to uncover several design opportunities. One of them is related to this mini-project.

Senior drivers have more physical impairments than a younger driver and therefore require more assistance. While talking to some research participants they mention that they have involved in accidents when changing lanes while driving or when leaving a parking spot. The reason being that they cannot properly turn to see how far apart a car is and sometimes calculating the distance using the car mirror is not enough.

The idea is to provide more feedback to the senior driver while changing lanes or leaving a parking spot. The idea of using lights in the dashboard will serve as feedback to senior drivers to calculate the distance between their car and another car close in proximity. The lights will be on whenever the two cars are too close, and they will be off whenever there is enough time and space for the elder driver to switch lanes or leave a parking spot.

For this project I have used two Sharp 2Y0A21 distance sensors and placed them on each side of the car. These distance sensors have four different stages of behavior. The first stage consists of the car driving whenever both distance sensors do not perceive anything. Whenever one of the distance sensors perceive something they will move away from it, these are the second and third stages. The final stage consists of the car coming to a complete stop whenever it senses things from both sides. Every time one of the sensors senses something close to it, the LED light on the same side will light up.

Code: http://pastebin.com/teCefiL0

What worked:
– The prove of concept worked, but I will keep developing this idea further through more iterations.
– The physical construction of the car.
– The car stopped whenever it sense something from both sides
– The car will advance whenever it didn’t sense anything.

What didn’t work:
– There was some static electricity which created interference between the two sensors and this caused the car to stop at abruptly at random times.
– Due to the same reason, one of the LED lights blinked randomly. This could have also have been because of the sensitivity in the distance sensors used.
– Also, due to the interference sometimes the response time of the car to move from one side to another was delayed and abrupt.

Testing programming and mechanism