Over spring break, I worked on getting the dog collar to interface with the Arduino micro controller. When I had it connected before, it was having issues reading stable values while the dog collar was not detecting the outer boundary of the dog fence. I found a simple issue with it, and fixed the problem. The polarity was backwards! So now I have this working with an analog input on the micro controller itself. To make this more simple when it comes to programming, I put the output to a 7414 inverting hex Schmitt trigger. I used the 7414 to clean up the output of the dog collar because it was not always giving a nice stable value. This will also allow us to use a digital input on the micro controller, and detect if it is at the boundary or not with boolean values rather than a range of values with the analog input.
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| Schmitt Trigger on breadboard |
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| Schmitt Trigger schematic |
Basically when the Schmitt trigger sees an input (I am currently using pin 1) that is above 1.7V it will trigger a low output on pin 2, and when the trigger sees an input lower than 0.8V, it sends out a high output on pin 2. Now when the dog collar is near the dog fence, the input on the micro controller will read a LOW, and when the dog collar is away from the fence, a HIGH will be read. I could potentially put the output of the inverter into the input of another inverter and the output of the second inverer to the micro controller to allow a HIGH to indicate the collar being next to the boundary, and a LOW to indicate the collar being away from the boundary.
