Motion Sensor - Stardance

Ship #1 Pending review

@vik on Motion Sensor · about 6 hours ago

Made an Arduino motion sensor connected to an LCD display. Every time it senses motion, the LCD will light up, “MOTION DETECTED”.

It was overall a super instructive experience, I learned how to cut and strip wires well, make a stable-ish connection with janky wires, read some confusing electrical diagrams, and write (technically modify) Arduino code (because online sample code was awful). I figured out how to troubleshoot problems on my own (eg wiring V0 to ground with a resistor because the display was too bright) and made sure to include the issue and fix in my documentation.

Note that in the video, the sensor was triggered a bunch of times by my moving the camera. It works decent, I promise (╥﹏╥)

1 devlog
2h build

Video of Project → See source code →

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@vik on Motion Sensor · about 7 hours ago

1h 39m 3s logged

Small afternoon project that I’ve been putting off for a long time: wiring a PIR motion sensor and LCD to my Arduino Uno, mostly just to finally try both the components at the same time.

The PIR sensor was pretty straightforward, three wires, but really janky because I don’t have a sensor shield or spare jumper wires (!). If the Neutral (white) wire isn’t connected well (it wasn’t) the digital pin will seesaw back and forth between Low and High with no rhyme or reason.

The LCD was a complete pain, again because I don’t have anything but some cheap wires and had to turn my breadboard into a rat’s nest. Also put one wire one spot to the right of where it should’ve been. “This little maneuver’s gonna cost us 51 years” type situation.

Anyway after that, wiring them both together was surprisingly painless, and with the help of some copy-pasted code I got it up and running quickly. Yippee, I have a little box that says MOTION DETECTED every time I walk by.