Hello! I was wondering if there was any sort of datasheet for the ping sonar.
Any datasheet would be greatly appreciated
cheers,
A
Hi @aperson, welcome to the forum 
Have you looked at the expandable Technical Details, Guides, and Community sections on the Ping Sonar product page?
If so, what information are you looking for that isn’t provided there?
Man, I am stupid. Yes, all of the required info is right there.
I was also wondering if you had any idea how to interface this to the Adafruit Crickit FeatherWing [Adafruit CRICKIT FeatherWing for any Feather : ID 3343 : $29.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits]
it may be as connecting Vin and ground to the power supply,
and TX and RX to their respective digital IO pins, but I just don’t know. Also, any example code would be greatly appreciated.
That’s not an expansion board I’m familiar with, and from a quick look at the page it’s not immediately obvious to me whether it can communicate with devices over TTL Serial (UART). Assuming the digital IO pins can be used as serial TX and RX then it should work to interface with the sensor, but you’ll need some way of telling the code which pins are being used / which serial interface is being used.
Once you’ve got a connection you should be able to use one of our Ping libraries, which include examples for using the different functionalities of the Ping Sonar.
I’ve changed to another Microcontroller (Adafruit Feather boards),
with TX and RX, so if it’s that simple, then it should work.
I’ve
It’s worth noting that working on one board doesn’t guarantee it works on all of them, especially since different boards may have different memory capacities and pin availability and the like.
Is there any plan to package that info as a datasheet?
It’s generally easier to open a PDF than a website!
Not that I’m aware of - it’s much easier for us to maintain and update a website than several PDFs, and web pages are able to include much more dynamic content (like 3D model views, shrinkable sections, and video embeds), while also not needing to deal with physical page breaks and the like.
If you specifically want something for temporary offline use you could take a screenshot or right click and download the webpage (including printing it (or some selected content) as a PDF if you’re using Chrome - just make sure to open the sections you want first). That said, products and guidance/warnings get revised from time to time, so we would generally recommend getting product information from the online product page whenever you need it, to make sure the information is up to date.
PDFs are harder to format nicely, more restrictive on the possible content, and less accessible to screen readers (because they don’t semantically segment the content). In a similar vein, it’s generally easier (and more consistent across programs) to open an image than a PDF, but images tend to take more memory and are even harder for a computer to semantically make sense of and modify. Whether a particular format is viable for an application is highly dependent on what it’s being used for.
With that in mind, what would you ideally want out of PDF datasheets of our products, and how do you imagine you would use them?
I quite like having personal offline copies of important resources, and we do already provide downloadable 3D models and schematics/component datasheets on many of our product pages. Are you wanting more of our content to be readily available in PDF form, or are you specifically wanting multiple resources for a given product to be combined into a single PDF (e.g. technical details + guides), or perhaps something else entirely?