This Arduino-Powered Headband Delivers Time-of-Flight Distance Sensing as a Vibrating "Sixth Sense"
Pop this on your noggin and enjoy a temple massage that gets more urgent the closer you get to obstacles.
Pseudonymous maker "krb93" has put together a wearable designed to deliver a "sixth sense" courtesy of a pair of time-of-flight (ToF) distance sensors — feeding back to the user through a vibrating headband.
"I made a headband that has time-of-flight sensors and vibration motors attached that will allow you to 'see' in the dark! While wearing Echo, as you get closer to objects in front of you, the vibration motors will vibrate quicker," krb93 explains of their first Arduino-based project. "This essentially acts as your sixth sense, similar to how some animals like bats and dolphins use echolocation. Did you know that dolphins can use echolocation to not only communicate over long distances, but also to map out 3D objects and create a detailed picture of it in their mind? Shape and texture and all!"
The heart of the project is an Arduino UNO-compatible microcontroller board connected to a pair of STMicroelectronics VL53L0X time-of-flight (ToF) ranging sensors — gadgets that fire out a beam of invisible laser light and watch for the reflection, calculating the distance between the sensor and the surface from which the laser bounced. These are mounted to a fabric headband, along with compact vibration motors — placed on the inside of the band, against the wearer's temples, to provide the strongest feedback.
For mounting and cable management, krb93 turned to a simple solution: string. "My wires were all over the place and looked like hair that just got shocked," the maker explains. "So, I used string to wrap all of the wires together into a single, thicker 'wire.' I did end up wrapping just the wires from the sensors together on either side, and then the two wires from the vibration motors together on either side but you can do them all together."
The project is documented in full in krb93's Instructables guide, along with source code and an STL to print a protective box to hold the ToF sensors at an ideal angle once mounted.