In some situations the size of a car may not be the best for your garage - or vice versa. Steve Kamerman found himself in the same situation and decided to solve the problem of parking damage by making a simple parking assistant with an Arduino. The device is quite simple yet works well - an ultrasonic distance sensor is used to detect how far the car is from the sensor, and LEDs are used to display this in simple form.
With some quick experimenting using the sensor you can determine the "safe" distance for the car in the garage, and then program the Arduino to display an LED to let you know how close you are when driving in.
It's a fun project that can be made in a few hours, so to learn more visit Steve's interesting website. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you're looking to make your own Arduino and LED-based project, consider our Freetronics RGBLED: full colour module. It includes a bright RGB LED on the top of the board and a WS2801 constant-current, addressable, multi-channel LED driver on the back. This smart module can be daisy-chained, so you can connect a number of these together in a string and drive each of the module colours individually from your microcontroller. For more information and to order, visit the product page.
