Guptchar Gupta - fun radar mapping experience using a Telegram Bot

Yesterday I was playing with arduino to learn its usage and tried to make a radar project. It is a quite simple project with many youtube tutorials on it. I made a radar using servo motor and ultrasonic sensor, then made a telegram bot to get the radar data. I didn’t have double sided tape in home so went to buy it while it was raining outside. Also the ultrasonicsensor wasn’t getting attached with the servomotor😭 I had to use rubber bands lol. It was indeed a fun experience.

What is an arduino?

Arduino is an opensource electronics platform that consists of both a physical programmable microcontroller and arduino IDE which is used to write and upload instructions code to the board. It has a chip, pins(digital and analog), power connector and serial connector. You can use sensors and many other devices to make project with it. There are many types of arduino board and the one I’m using is Arduino Uno.

The project

The initial step in the project involved assembling the components and compiling the instructions for the microcontroller, followed by uploading the compiled code to the board. Below is the circuit diagram used for this project:

Now talk about the workflow. I used processing IDE to visualize the ultrasonic sensor data. It take snapshot of the frame and saves it as an image, also it writes the angle and distance value to a text file named data.txt.

And when you run the telegram bot and give it command /scan, it fetches the data.txt and the image too. Here’s what the bot looks like

For those interested in replicating this project, I invite you to explore my GitHub repository, where I’ve documented the entire process.

Messing around with arduino and a telegram bot to visualize radar data was pretty cool. I got a glimpse of how these things can be used in realworld and also how hardware and software can be used togather to make cool stuffs. It may be for fun, learning or to actually solve a problem making such projects teaches you a lot.