Works as advertised first try
For OctosonarX2 - connect 16 x HC-SR04 to Arduino
I used this product to add obstacle avoidance to a chassis with skid steering.
Everything worked first try with no troubleshooting needed.
I had to intuit how to put it together from the parts photos but it wasn't hard. Assembly involved a bunch of soldering - if you're slow like me plan about an hour.
Getting the sensors at the right angles was tricky, most of mine are ~5 degrees above or below the horizon line. Did not appear to affect navigation. Mounted easily to actobotics pattern plate.
After setup you will need to manually identify the sensors one by one to know how to address them.
The refresh rate for the setup seems pretty slow, maybe 250ms? This is my first use of ultrasonics so maybe that's expected. Practically speaking it makes it tricky to do something like smoothly slow based on distance, you'll have to use sampling and interpolation to get an effect like that. The readings are quite consistent and stable.
The actual layout of the sensors, with 2 per Cardinal direction and 1 per diagonal, is not ideal for a larger bot - mine is 10" wide and a dead center table leg results in a collision. I plan on reconfiguring mine to rotate the front sensor clusters so that the center sensor in each cluster points forward, and the others point 45 degrees off of center, creating a protective triangle in front of the bot for emergency braking when it sees a table leg etc.
Overall I'm pleased with the kit for it's price and found it well designed. I would recommend it for a chassis that needs emergency braking capability in multiple directions. To use it for navigation/mapping shouldnt be super hard if you have the necescesary feedback about movement and rotation. I would not recommend this kit for bots intended to move faster than 0.5 m/s.
