Hello,
I am very new to Raspberry Pi and world of sensors.
I have a project in medical sector where I need to count anything dropped in a container. That thing may be a piece of paper, a textile, wood, cotton, hand of a person (which goes in and out) just anything which fits in size. I have a goal of counting without any error and missing nothing dropped in.
After some research, I think, I need to use some proximity sensor. Without knowing much, I want to use HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensors. However, I am open to any suggestions.
Container is kind of wide like 40cm and length is about 75 to 100cm. Even above sensor is capable of measuring about 4mt in distance, I still cannot control container opening using a single sensor because sensor is not measuring by angle. So, I am planning to use about 10 of above sensors (or any other suggested sensors) closely mounted next to each other. Even I think of something like that, I believe, it will not be logical (or will be a complete pain) to connect them all into a different GPIO on Raspberry Pi. I do not want to think about coding an application for such a hardware setup either.
My question is: Is there a way to connect all 10 of the sensors to each other and just single connection to Raspberry Pi? All sensors will be working as if they are a single sensor, closest range measured among the set of sensors will be sent to raspberry pi as a measurement.
If such a configuration is possible, I appreciate some “things to buy” and “how to assemble” explanations. Would love some web links as a tutorial with pictures. I couldn’t find any such explanations, web pages. Maybe because I am a total newbie and not using correct technical words to do googling.
Thanks & regards,
-Ertan