How To Measure Height Of A Ceiling In 2017 In A Proper Way

Introduction

Modern technology can help to end a simple argument about matters like how high this ceiling is. If the ones that argue are engineers then this has to be solved in a proper way. Well, how? Using a laser meter? Yikes! is this the best you come up with?

Drones... Barometric Pressure... 3D printer.... Drones... Barometric Altimeter... Are you catching where I am going through?

We have a lot of flying stuff at the office but Parrot Cargo Drone was the perfect choice for this mission. It has Lego connection points on and around of the drone. Then we needed a programmable lightweight and compact development board with an onboard barometric pressure sensor, a battery and a screen. watchX was way to go, it's small and totally eligible to fly. Parrot Cargo Drone is a small drone with a limited power. The overall solution that we mount on top of drone should be very lightweight!

Instructions

WatchX is currently on Indiegogo.

Then, we downloaded a Lego brick from GrabCad, we made a drawing based on the Lego brick connection. We made a two-part design to make printing process easy.

The mechanic part was ready. To measure the height we need a firmware as well. watchX uses BMP280 barometric pressure sensor, the successor of BMP180. Adafruit has an excellent library for BMP280. We simply downloaded it and imported into Arduino IDE. To drive the OLED we also used Adafruit OLED library. Rest was easy.

What the code basically does is that it shows current altitude and shows the total ascent. We needed one more thing. We need to subtract the base altitude where we will make the measurement. There is 3 tactile button on the watchX. We used one of them to take the altitude of the point where drone located and subtract it from the current altitude.

Video

Rest... Enjoy the video:

It also doubles as a desktop watch: