Map Your Room with This "Radar" Scanner

Radar may be an old technology at this point in time, but on the coolness scale it is still way ahead of more modern trends like foldable smartphones or AI-generated art. There is just something about the way it silently sweeps around, revealing a world otherwise invisible to us, that draws us in. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to operate a radar installation in your home if you want to play around with this technology in your projects.

Redditor Fpr has come up with a simple gadget that may be the next best thing to radar. While the project is called “Duck radar,” it is technically sonar, but the effect is very similar. The device rotates to scan the area around it, and anything that blocks the ultrasonic signal it emits will be shown on a small display.

The project is built around an Arduino development board. That is wired to a servo, which has an ultrasonic sensor glued to the top of it. A 0.96-inch LCD display rounds out the bill of materials, and everything is wired together on a breadboard.

Firmware was flashed to the Arduino to control the servo and make it continually sweep back and forth. That, in turn, causes the ultrasonic sensor to pivot. Data from the sensor is processed by the Arduino and shown on a radar-style display. The distance of anything in front of the sensor can be positioned on the screen according to the position that the servo is in when the measurement was captured.

There is no formal build guide, however, the circuit is very basic so it would be easy to reproduce from the pictures. Fpr has also dropped the source code in a comment, so it wouldn’t take long at all to get your own “radar” up and running if you have the parts on hand.