Parkonator

In Part 1 of the blog series I described how you can use an Arduino to capture and decode parking sensor data from cheapo parking sensors found all over Amazon. In this part I will talk about how to send this data over from one Arduino to another using I2C protocol and why you even need to worry about that.

Video Experimenter Shield

First, a word about the Nootropic Video Experimenter shield. This shield is pretty sweet, it’s cheap, it uses the TVOut library and it works pretty much as advertised. The shipping is quick too! We’ll use this shield to overlay the parking sensor information over the composite video signal coming off the read view camera (this will be described in part 3). So, […]

“Parkonator”

Historically I have preferred car stereos that look like they actually came with the car. My particular head unit is a Clarion CX609, I like it because it matches the green interior lights of my car (as much as I dislike green as an interior color). However, recently I’ve been keeping an eye out for an Android powered double din head unit. In particular, the Parrot Asteroid Smart, which just looks cool as hell for a variety of reasons. My car (2005 Pontiac GTO) is notoriously hard to see out of, especially when parking. I figured I could use the new stereo’s ability to display video from a reverse camera, and perhaps I could even spice it up a bit.. A few weeks ago I’ve picked up a pair of cheap generic SE4 parking sensors from Amazon. I believe these are very similar to the better known Pyle brand sensors. Using an Arduino, I was able to hack these to overlay parking sensor information on top of a cheap license plate mounted reverse camera. With these tools, the Parkonator project was born!

Components

This project required a few things to work:

• Arduino UNO R3
• Arduino Mini 04
• Arduino Mini USB Adapter (to program the Mini)
• Video Experimenter shield (by Nootropic Design)
• A cheapo composite license plate mounted reverse camera
• SE4 parking sensor system x 2 (front and rear)
• Some breadboards

Hacking The Parking Sensors

First things first, I had to somehow extract the sensor information from the parking sensor system. Each box arrived with 4 sensors, a controller and a little display that […]