Active Battlefield Obstacle: Landmine

For some time now, we have been talking about augmenting the battlefield with some active "obstacles".  Doug made some prototypes and finally I got around to making one myself.  My first obstacle is the "landmine". 

Read on for more details and a video...

 The system is a simple PIC chip attached to a Sharp GP2D12 distance sensor.  This sensor returns the distance from the sensor to an object in front of it from ~10cm to ~80cm.  The PIC also has a general purpose relay, an 8Ω speaker and an IR LED attached as outputs. The programming is as simple as can be. We take 4 samples from the sensor and average them.  If there is an object within ~25cm, the relay is turned on and it plays a short scale on the speaker.  At this point, it "fires" a 1s IR shot (moduled to match the Tamiya electronics). It then plays the scale in reverse and turns off the relay.  The device then goes dormant for 10s before starting all over again. This is the first cut at programming for it, we've already talked about a number of possible changes (e.g. randomness, smoke, different timing, etc), but I first want to get the sound playing with the shot and add some watchdog timer functions, so much more to come.

Anyway, here is the first prototype on my deck hitting my Panther as I drive by it.

So far, so good.I hope to have 4 on the field in November.