“There goes the neighborhood” isn’t a phrase to be thrown about lightly, but when they build a police station next door to your house, you know things are about to get noisy. Just how bad it’ll be is perhaps a bit subjective, with pleas for relief likely to fall on deaf ears unless you’ve got firm documentation like that provided by this automated noise detection system.
OK, let’s face it — even with objective proof there’s likely nothing that [Christopher Cooper] is going to do about the new crop of sirens going off in his neighborhood. Emergencies require a speedy response, after all, and sirens are perhaps just the price that we pay to live close to each other. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to monitor the neighborhood noise, though, so [Christopher] got to work. The system uses an Arduino BLE Sense module to detect neighborhood noises and Edge Impulse to classify the sounds. An ESP32 does most of the heavy lifting, including running the UI on a nice little TFT touchscreen.
When a siren-like sound is detected, the sensor records the event and tries to classify the type of siren — fire, police, or ambulance. You can also manually classify sounds the system fails to understand, and export a summary of events to an SD card. If your neighborhood noise problems tend more to barking dogs or early-morning leaf blowers, no problem — you can easily train different models.
While we can’t say that this will help keep the peace in his neighborhood, we really like the way this one came out. We’ve seen the BLE Sense and Edge Impulse team up before, too, for everything from tuning a bike suspension to calming a nervous dog.
I once lived in an apartment in an area with such a bad reputation I couldn’t even get food delivered. For years it was all quiet, I couldn’t figure out why people thought it was so dangerous.
The police had a little mini-station in one of the apartment units.
Then one day the city decided to spend their money on other things. And the mini-station was closed.
Almost immediately the break-ins started. So I moved.
Sometimes police ARE great neighbors.
Fund the police, abolish DAs and publicly humiliate them in stockades
I think the project is not so great, seems to be analog audio processing on another board? but no schematic for that could I find. The ESP32 portion looks nothing special.
Problem here is sirens, airplanes, or loud motorcycles racing etc. so I wanted something that can take a small .mp3 snippet of the sound, and just trigger when it’s much louder than average background noise.
Wouldn’t you need the ability to write to a disc in order to record sound or would you do the processing in memory? So you would get the input and then push it to the cloud or you would have it run locally? Also, this thing would have to be running/listening 24/7.. what about a decibel threshold?