Smart Blind Stick using Arduino

Ever heard of Hugh Herr? He is a famous American rock climber who has shattered
the limitations of his disabilities; he is a strong believer that technology could help
disabled persons to live a normal life. In one of his TED talk Herr said “Humans are
not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies,
is broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transfer
disability through technological Innovation”. These were not just words but he lived
his life to them, today he uses Prosthetic legs and claims to live to normal life. So yes,
technology can indeed neutralize human disability; with this in mind let us use some
simple devlopment boards and sensors to build an ultrasonic blind walking stick using
Arduino that could perform more than just a stick for visually impaired persons.
Blind Stick Circuit Diagram:

This Arduino Smart Blind Stick Project requires two separate circuits. One is the main circuit which
will be mounted on the blind man’s stick. The other is a small remote RF transmitter circuit which
will be used to locate the main circuit. The main board’s circuit diagram to build a blind stick using
ultrasonic sensor is shown below:
As we can see an Arduino Nano is used to control all the sensors, but you can also build this Smart
blind stick using arduino uno but following the same pinouts and program. The complete board is
powered by a 9V battery which is regulated to +5V using a 7805 Voltage regulator. The Ultrasonic
sensor is powered by 5V and the trigger and Echo pin is connected to Arduino nano pin 3 and 2 as
shown above. The LDR is connected with a resistor of value 10K to form a Potential divider and the
difference in voltage is read by Arduino ADC pin A1. The ADC pin A0 is used to read the signal from
RF receiver. The output of the board is given by the Buzzer which is connected to pin 12.