ULTRASONIC BASED

DISTANCE
MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION
PROPERTIES OF ULTRASOUND
ULTRASONIC AS DISTANCE SENSOR
IMPORTANT COMPONENTS AND THEIR
FUNCTION
OVERALL WORKING PRINCIPLE
BLOCK DIAGRAM FOR ULTRASONIC BASED
DISTANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM
APPLICATION
CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION
The techniques of distance measurement using
ultrasonic in air include continuous wave and
pulse echo technique. In the pulse echo method, a
burst of pulses is sent through the transmission
medium and is reflected by an object kept at
specified distance.
This project is used to measure the distance by
using ultrasonic sensors. It works by transmitting
ultrasonic waves at 40 kHz. Then, the transducers
will measure the amount of time taken for a pulse
of sound travel to a particular surfaces and return
as the reflected echo.

PROPERTIES OF ULTRASOUND
Frequency higher than 20 000Hz(far above the human
auditory range )
A medium is needed for sound waves to go through, no
medium = no sound waves.
Ultrasonic generators use piezo-electric materials such
as zinc or lead zirconium tartrates or quartz crystal.
Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths, which
allow them to reflect from objects more readily and to
provide better information about those objects.

ULTRASONIC AS DISTANCE SENSOR

Ultrasonic sensors (also known as transceivers
when they both send and receive) work on a
principle, which evaluate attributes of a target by
interpreting the echoes from radio or sound waves
respectively. Ultrasonic sensors generate high
frequency sound waves and evaluate the echo
which is received back by the sensor. Sensors
calculate the time interval between sending the
signal and receiving the echo to determine the
distance to an object.

ULTRASONIC AS DISTANCE SENSOR

(CONT.)
Sound field of a non focusing 4MHz ultrasonic
transducer with the transducer surface having a
spherical curvature.

IMPORTANT COMPONENTS
AND THEIR FUNCTION
ULTRASONIC MODULE
MICROCONTROLLER
LCD DISPLAY

ULTRASONIC MODULE
Ultrasonic ranging module HC - SR04 provides 2cm - 400cm
non-contact measurement function, The modules includes
ultrasonic transmitters, receiver and control circuit.The project
is build around 8051 basedmicrocontroller. The distance is
displayed on LCD. The working of the ultrasonic sensors is
quite simple and they are easy to interface with the
microcontroller.
The sensor module has 4-pins out of which Pin-1 and Pin-4 are
+Vcc and Gnd respectively.Pin-2 is Trigger and Pin-3 is Echo
pin.When a High pulse of 10us is applied at TRIG pin, the
ultrasonic transmitter sends 8 consecutive pulses of 40kHz
frequency. As the Eighth pulse is sent ,the ECHO pin of the
sensor becomes HIGH. Now when the ultrasonic waves reflect
from any surface and are received by the Receiver, the ECHO
pin becomes LOW.

MICROCONTROLLER
Microcontroller is an electronic device which is used as a computing unit or
arithmetic unit like a computer.
It has internally 4K ROM.
It has 128 Bytes on chip RAM.
Two 16bit TIMER or COUNTER to count the internal or external pulses.
One FULL DUPLEX UART(Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmit) for
SERIAL communication where TxD stands for TRANSMIT DATA and RxD
received data.
Four ON-CHIP I/O port (P0,P1,P2,P3),each are 8bitwise.So microcontroller
have 32bit I/O lines, where P0,P2 are used for address and data bus as
well as I/O port.P1 port is used only as I/O port and P3 is used for various
job purpose.
INTERRUPTs: interrupts are six-two external, three internal and RESET is
another interrupt.
On chip bus controller which controls all the buses.
On chip oscillator circuit.
8bit CPU optimization for process control. It may be used as an ALU or
data processing unit.
On chip interrupt controller which have three internal interrupts and two
external interrupt .From these five only one interrupt goes to CPU.
The operating frequency 12MHZ.

BLOCK DIAGRAM OF MICROCONTROLLER

8051

Interfacing LCD display with

Microcontroller:
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) consists of rod-shaped tiny molecules
sandwiched between a flat piece of glass and an opaque substrate.
These rod-shaped molecules in between the plates align into two
different physical positions based on the electric charge applied to
them. When electric charge is applied they align to block the light
entering through them, where as when no-charge is applied they
become transparent.
Light passing through makes the desired images appear. This is the
basic concept behind LCD displays.LCDs are most commonly used
because of their advantages over other display technologies. They are
thin and flat and consume very small amount of power compared to
LED displays and cathode ray tubes (CRTs).

OVERALL WORKING
PRINCIPLE
With an ultrasonic transducer, the waves propagate out from
the transducer face with a circular wave front, these waves
travel through the medium until they encounter any obstacles
in its path, owing to their shorter wavelength, they are readily
reflected back by these obstacles , these reflected waves are
picked up by the receiver circuit, these signals are amplified
several times . The board can easily be interfaced to
microcontrollers where the triggering and measurement can be
done using one output pulse that corresponds to the time
required for the burst echo I/O pin. The sensor transmits an
ultrasonic wave and produces an to return to the sensor. By
measuring the echo pulse width,the distance to target can
easily be calculated. The reflected signal is detected by the
receiver, at this time microcontroller acts as a input so it takes
signal from receiver and it calculates the distance when the
signal is coming from object to receiver and that distance is
displayed on LCD 16*2 through microcontroller.

Block Diagram for Ultrasonic Based

Distance Measurement System

WORKING(CONT.)
12 milliseconds is the time taken for the
ultrasound waves to travel a maximum
distance of 4 meters (time of flight gives
twice the time taken to traverse a unit
distance
This system of distance measurement does
not require large amount of memory hence a
40 pin 8051 based microcontroller AT89C51,
is chosen as the controller with 12MHz clock.
It performs the operation of giving the
switching signal, computing the distance,
converting the hex value to decimal and then
to ASCII to be displayed in the LCD.

APPLICATION
Positioning & Locating :- Distance measurement
sensors are used to control or indicate the position of
objects and materials.
Dimensioning & Selecting :- Distance measurement
sensors can determine the dimensions of objects such
as height, width and diameter, using one or more
sensors. Items can be selected or rejected based on
their dimensions or profiles.
Anti-collision detection :- It can be used to detect
and alert for collision.
Rescue :- It can be very useful in rescuing anybody
inside a pithole and also very useful in mining industry.

CONCLUSION
The microcontroller with LCD makes it user
friendly. The circuit can easily been
implemented on bread board and tested for its
functionality by varying the distance between
the transducer and the target. The target
surface needs to be perpendicular to the
impinging ultrasound waves. The power level
of the signal is too low for long range
measurement. Less hardware are used so
smaller in size. Inexpensive components used
so that reduces the cost per unit .

THANK YOU