What's the cheapest way to detect vibration with Arduino?
What's the vibration sensor that I need?
I want to detect PING PONG NET vibration and light on led if touched.
Electronic – arduino – What’s the cheapest way to detect vibration with Arduino
arduinocomponentspiezoelectricitysensor
Related Solutions
You have to decide what exactly you are trying to detect. You say "horizontal rocking" which implies a pivoting motion, but then "horizontal plane movements" which is something else. You need to make up your mind. I would detect these two differently.
Also, what exactly is "movement". Do you need to know the distance your object has moved, it's speed, or will acceleration do?
Acceleration is the easiest of these to measure with small and cheap off the shelf sensors. A number of companies, including Freescale and Analog Devices, make MEMS accelerometers. These come in flavors that either put out a analog signal proportional to acceleration, or also digital. You can use two single-axis accelerometers, or it may be more convenient to use one two-axis chip to detect motion in a plane. With the two axes aligned along the plane, the total acceleration magnitude is the square root of the sum of the squares of the individual acceleration signals. If you're just looking for some threshold, then you can square the individual signals, add them, and compare that to the square of the acceleration threshold.
You can do limited itegration of such acceleration signals. There is enough offset and hysteresis in cheap MEMS accelerometers that inertial navigation for more than a second or two becomes so inaccurate as to be unusable for most purposes.
A 10-bit ADC at 5V has a resolution of 5mV. Your sensor has a sensitivity of 100mV per inch, which you reduce by your resistor divider to 50mV per inch. That means 10 ADC counts per inch. This isn't much, especially when you think that you'll always have some noise in your readings.
If you're interested in only a small range, like the 1.99V..2.09V, subtract the 1.99V from the input using a difference amplifier and amplify 50-fold to get a range from 0V to 5V.
If R1=R2 and R3=R4 then
\$V_{OUT} = \dfrac{R3}{R1} \times (V_2 - V_1) \$
I would still use a low-pass filter in software to filter out the noise.
Related Topic
- Electronic – Circuit movement detector
- Electronic – Finding a sensor for vibration of impact event, preferably for interface with arduino
- Electronic – arduino – Touching Person-to-Person
- Electronic – Mini Skee Ball – Detecting a ping pong ball
- Electronic – Arduino piezo vibration measurement circuit
- Electrical – Vibration frequency measurement with a piezo sensor
- Electrical – SW-420 vibration sensor module getting stuck
Best Answer
Piezo sensors are cheap, reliable and designed for the purpose you suggest - arduino tutorial
In the uk, bitsbox has one for 75p. You can probably find others cheaper, or salvage from electronic toys.
EDIT following poster's clarification of use: Sound is vibration through the air, I see no reason why a piezo sensor cannot accomplish what you suggest, but the form factor may not be ideal for fixing to ping pong nets! I think a flex sensor would be more suitable, sewn into the top of the net.