Mechanically push button as choices on a Surveying roaming Robot.

Projects General Guidance
1

I am trying to build a robot that can be used for surveying people. With this, I am considering the use of mechanical push button that will act as the choices for my questions.

What I have been thinking is that I will use a transducer to transfer the mechanical signal from the push button and transmit it into the Arduino , then the Arduino will store it at MicroSD Module 2Gb for Arduino or SD card shield for Arduino V2.1.

Expected Problems and some Floating Questions:

  1. I don't know how to convert the mechanical input into electrical pulse and the electrical pulse into tally.
  2. What program to use to check the tally.
  3. Can I use data base for this project? And what data base exactly?

Any suggestions? thanks guys. :smiley:

2
  1. push buttons can be directly connected to the arduino, see the tutorials about it.
  2. you have to write it yourself.
  3. yes search for Arduino database, there are some libaries.
3

Two pieces of wire stuck into the appropriate Arduino connectors can act as a switch so I don't understand why you are talking about a transducer. Any cheap pushbutton or toggle switch should be fine.

You won't be able to run any off-the-shelf database program on an Arduino Uno or Mega, and you may not need to if all that is needed is to store data into a file on an SD card for subsequent analysis on a PC.

If you really do need a database you will need to use a Yun or a Raspberry PI as they can run the Linux operating system. SQLite is an easy-to-use database for simple systems.

Presumably you are going to need some sort of screen display to present the questions to people. That can be done with an Arduino, but I suspect it would be very much easier with a Raspberry PI

...R