SRF005 sensors to work through the PICAXE-18 Project Board

[WAVE123]

I am a teacher at a secondary school in England and I am trying to get SRF005 sensors to work through the PICAXE-18 Project Board that my student use in their microcontroller project. For programming of these boards we use Picaxe editor and the flowchart programming.
I have 3 pin SRF005 sensors (with pin 4/5 on the 5 side connected as required) but I can not find a way to get a read out from the Sensor.
I have put SIG pin in C1 (output directly to the picaxe chip), the centre pin goes to +voltage and the 0V pin goes to ground.
I have use the flow chart elements ULTRA and then DEBUG as suggested in SRF005 data sheet but I don't get any response from Sensor - no changes seen in varA.
Has anyone successfully attached a SRF005 to a Picaxe-18 Project board? if so how.
Or does anyone have any suggestions about what I am doing wrong.
Thank you for any help

 

[AllyCat]

Hi,

Welcome to the forum. You might struggle to get a definitive answer because most members don't program with Flowcharts and probably don't have a SRF005 or a PICaxe-18 Project Board (me included) to test the hardware. It's generally recommended to post your complete Program (in Basic) and detailed photograph(s) of the electrical connections, since many errors can be quite "obvious" to regular users. The most common problems are hardware-related such bad or incorrect solder joints and here it seems important to connect both pins 4 and 5 of the SRF005 header to ground.

Personally, I prefer Blockly to the Flowchart, but usually both soon fail to achieve what I want to do, and I end up programming in Basic again. However, to see what might be wrong I tried the Flowchart in the current Program Editor (PE6), because sometimes the "examples" are out-of-date. Anyway, I drew a minumum Flowchart and converted it to Basic (using: File > Export > Convert to Basic) which appeared to create appropriate code, but it might be worth trying one of the Basic Examples from the SRF005 Datasheet. Rather a Long Shot, but it's difficult to suggest a "solution" to a described problem which should work.

Here is a thread from a few years ago which seems to deal with a similar problem.

Cheers, Alan.

 

[Technical]

There is nothing wrong in theory with what you describe, although for ease of simpler wiring we would have probably used the 3 pin servo header H0 bottom right (pin B.0) of the PCB. So there is either a wiring issue or a coding issue. Is the 10k pull down resistor still on the board or removed (page 5 of https://picaxe.com/docs/chi030a.pdf)

Often in this scenario it is found to be not a genuine PICAXE store brand SRF005 (blue colour) sensor but an ebay type clone device instead. These can still work, but will need subtly different connections due to their configuration. A photo of what you have setup so we can see what is going on so far is the best way forward.