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Troubleshooting Further Work
The PCB design incorporates multiple 'power enable' pads which will allow the subsystems to be powered in isolation, more details are provided on the PCB page. This should aid in troubleshooting the construction of the PCB. Care should be taken to ensure the diodes are connected properly to the motor driver module as fast switching of the inductive load without diode protection whilst connected to the Raspberry Pi GPIO may cause irreparable damage to the Pi. When encountering any hardware issues be sure to carefully consult the datasheets within the resources folder.
Currently the BowlsEye system exhibits inconsistency in the distance calculations. This is most likely due to coupling between the transmission and reception transducers upon excitation which cause false positive results for a return echo. Possible solutions to this may be to begin clocking the SPI signal at a fixed point after the transmission excitation is performed. This may require a custom kernal implementation due to inconsistencies in measuring microsecond time on the Raspberry Pi with a Raspbian OS.
From oscilloscope measurements of the received pulse, the coupling waveform is ~300us in length however we found that ignoring this portion of the received signal and thresholding based on later values still did not achieve suitable results. Further experimentation in this is required.