Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, 2nd Edition

Creating Your Own Dashboard

Instead of printing our digital and analog sensor data to a serial port, we’ll simulate a small part of a modern car’s dashboard in this section. Most cars today show the current temperature, and many also have a parking-distance control system that warns you if you get too close to another object.

In my car, the parking-distance control consists of a couple of orange and red LEDs. If nothing’s near the car, all LEDs are off. As soon as the distance between the car and a potential obstacle gets too small, the first orange LED lights up. The shorter the distance, the more LEDs that light up. If the distance reaches a critical limit, all LEDs are on, and the car plays an annoying beep tone.

Here’s the application we’re ...