Hand-Mounted Sonar For the Blind

GeekTech.in writes "The Tacit, a wrist-mounted sonar device with haptic feedback, is like strapping a bat to your wrist to help you see. It makes use of two sonar ping sensors to measure the distance to the nearest obstacle. The relative distance to an object is then fed back to the user using two servos which apply pressure to the back of the wrist."

Comments

Bad news, good news

[ozmanjusri]

Well, the bad news is that it's an incredibly ugly watch.

The good news is that it's users will never know.

Hot point which summary doesn't mention..

[intellitech]

And it should've, damnit.

Keep reading for more information, build notes, parts list, schematics, and code. ...

Important Note #2: The circuit and software is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which I think of as a "Don't be a jerk" license. In short: Make it, learn from it, teach it, improve it, modify it. Just share what you do, give credit, and don't sell any without contacting me first.

PARTS LIST?!? CIRCUIT INFO?!? WOOOT! Now this looks like a damn fun toy.

Re:Hot point which summary doesn't mention..

[siddesu]

I did something similar for my blind dog, which it used for a year before it died earlier this year. I a circuit like this one as starting point: http://www.kerrywong.com/2011/01/22/a-sensitive-diy-ultrasonic-range-sensor, and a cheap vibration motor like this one: https://www.dealextreme.com/p/repair-parts-vibration-motor-for-iphone-4-73348, but you can use a parallax PING module or something similar.

Basically, a controller (I used an atmega chip with an arduino bootloader) that sends pings and moves the motors stronger as the obstacle is closer. Mounted it on the head of the dog, and had the two vibration motors on two sides of the chest. The dog had it figured out in less than a day.

The only "hard" part is that if you go DIY all the way, you'll need an oscilloscope to build the ultrasonic sensor thing, otherwise it is rather simple.

Batty acronyms

[AthanasiusKircher]

From the summary (a suggestion that sounds improbable and unadvised):

...like strapping a bat to your wrist to help you see...

From TFA:

This is a project I'm calling Tacit. No, I didn't bother making an awkward backronym for it....

I think he's not telling us everything. I'll bet the T in TACIT stands for pteropine... it's just that the 'p' is tacit......

Re:Worst description ever

[Lysander7]

You've obviously never heard of Ben Underwood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Underwood#Ben_Underwood), whom is often listed among the top ten contemporary inspirational people. Not only was he able to "see" using echolocation via clicking noises with his tongue, he excelled at tasks such as mountain biking. And he is not the last blind person able to do so.

human echolocation

[phantomfive]

Blind humans can do a better job of echolocation just with there ears. Check it out (An amazing more complete version, but it's long).

There's even a school that helps teach echolocation to blind people, based in California, I believe. Wikipedia has a basic writeup on it.

Seriously it's pretty amazing to think that a human can develop echolocation ability. But we can.

dual use

[Black Parrot]

And when someone hassles you too much, you just set it on 'stun' and give them a blast with it.