Managing 2 ultrasonic sensors without blocking the other

Question

I have an ultrasonic distance sensor. When this sensor is measuring a distance below 25 cm, a second sensor has to be measuring a distance below 5 cm. If not, there should be a one minute timespan, after which a speaker should make noise until the second sensor is measuring a distance below 5 cm.

I am having trouble with this. The first sensor has a lot of code it should be running as well, so using a while-loop to wait out one minute for the other sensor and creating noise after that isn't a possibility.

How do I go about this dilemma? I read into interrupts in Arduino but unfortunately I don't know how I'd make this work.

Answer 1

I strongly advice you to use interrupts and make sure the sensors are in a cylindrical cone in order to prevent interference to each others as much as possible.

Here is code snippet which can give you an idea how the interrupts are set and used. I believe that you can adapt it to yours. It is from Arduino forum (link), credits to "cattledog".

volatile unsigned long LastPulseTimeA;
volatile unsigned long LastPulseTimeB;
int durationA;
int durationB;
//unsigned long startTime;
#define trigPinA 7
#define echoPinA 2
#define trigPinB 8
#define echoPinB 3
void setup() {
  Serial.begin (9600);
  pinMode(trigPinA, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(echoPinA, INPUT);
   pinMode(trigPinB, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(echoPinB, INPUT);  
attachInterrupt(digitalPinToInterrupt(echoPinA), EchoPinA_ISR, CHANGE);  // Pin 2 interrupt on any change
attachInterrupt(digitalPinToInterrupt(echoPinB),EchoPinB_ISR, CHANGE);  // Pin3 interrupt on any change
}
void loop(){
  digitalWrite(trigPinA, LOW);
  digitalWrite(trigPinB, LOW);
  delayMicroseconds(2);
  digitalWrite(trigPinA, HIGH);
  digitalWrite(trigPinB, HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(10);
  digitalWrite(trigPinA, LOW);
  digitalWrite(trigPinB, LOW);
  Serial.print("Sensor A  ");
  Serial.print(LastPulseTimeA);
  Serial.print('\t');
  Serial.print((LastPulseTimeA/2) / 29.1,1);
  Serial.println("cm");
  Serial.print("Sensor B  ");
  Serial.print(LastPulseTimeB);
  Serial.print('\t');
  Serial.print((LastPulseTimeB/2) / 29.1,1);
  Serial.println("cm");

  delay(1000);
}
void EchoPinA_ISR() {
    static unsigned long startTimeA;

    if (digitalRead(echoPinA)) // Gone HIGH
        startTimeA = micros();
    else  // Gone LOW
        LastPulseTimeA = micros() - startTimeA;
}
void EchoPinB_ISR() {
    static unsigned long startTimeB;

    if (digitalRead(echoPinB)) // Gone HIGH
        startTimeB = micros();
    else  // Gone LOW
        LastPulseTimeB = micros() - startTimeB;
}

Answer 2

fairly simple:

  if (time_is_up_for_sensor1()) read_sensor1(); //read sensor1 if time is up
  if (time_is_up_for_sensor2()) read_sensor2(); //read sensor2 if time is up

in time_is_up_for_sensor1/2(), update for the next round of reading:

int time_is_up_for_sensor1(void) {
  static uint32_t millis_next = 0; //next millis
  if (millis() >= millis_next) {  //time is up for sensor1
    millis_next += INTERVAL_SENSOR1; //advance to the next measurement time
    return 1;  //needs to read sensor1
  } else return 0;
}

similarly for sensor2