Homebuilt Rov Forum

well I can confirm that my sonar sensor will not work in a housing. as soon as I covered the sensor, it reported the minimum distance of 6". I tried a few different types of plastic (plastic bags, thin plastic sheet, pvc). all reported 6".

I may pick up one of those harbor freight fish finders if I find it on sale.

Since there was some interest, I'll give a quick update. I ended up getting one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Waterproof-Ultr ... 0721354139 and putting it in a waterproof housing. Preliminary results in the swimming pool show that it can measure from 4 to 12 feet pretty accurately. In theory it should work out to about 35 feet, but I won't get around to testing that until the end of this week/early next week.

During tests in air, I noticed that the sensor wasn't getting good returns off of a person at 6 or more feet away. It did work well with large-ish flat objects, however.

This opens up possibilities for having cheap AUVs be able to navigate around a pool (my project), or having rovs that can detect (or possibly hold) their distance from the bottom (with a minimum range reading of 4 feet). It could also help you avoid running into large (flat?) objects in murky water.

Hope someone is able to use this information to make something cool.

-Seawolf

care to detail the housing you built?

thanks!

I just put a hole in a tupperware container and sealed the hole/lid with silicone. Not terribly showy, but it gets the job done well enough for testing. I'll try to remember to get a picture later this week.

In anyone is interested, the datasheet for the sensor is here: http://www.sure-electronics.net/downloa ... anual.pdf/
Remember that sound travels ~4.3 times as fast in water, so the ranges will need to be scaled appropriately. I believe the sensing angle will also change in water, but I haven't confirmed that yet.

If anyone is using an arduino, the demo code for using the Ping sensor can be easily modified to work with this sensor.

Cheers,
-Seawolf

I see. the transducer is watertight so you made a housing for the electronics. my transducer is open which is why I can't seal it up.

thanks!

I'm a little slow, but here's the picture of the waterproof ultrasonic sensor I made.


Like I said previously, it measures out to about 12 feet accurately. I'm going to try adding some kind of cone around the transducer to try to filter out unwanted reflections from the surface, etc. I'll post an update if there's any improvement.

-Seawolf