sound

87 Articles

Measuring A Well With Just A Hammer And A Smartphone

December 19, 2024 by 38 Comments

What’s the best way to measure the depth of a well using a smartphone? If you’re fed up with social media, you might kill two birds with one stone and drop the thing down the well and listen for the splash. But if you’re looking for a less intrusive — not to mention less expensive — method, you could also use your phone to get the depth acoustically.

This is a quick hack that [Practical Engineering Solutions] came up with to measure the distance to the surface of the water in a residential well, which we were skeptical would work with any precision due to its deceptive simplicity. All you need to do is start a sound recorder app and place the phone on the well cover. A few taps on the casing of the well with a hammer send sound impulses down the well; the reflections from the water show up in the recording, which can be analyzed in Audacity or some similar sound editing program. From there it’s easy to measure how long it took for the echo to return and calculate the distance to the water. In the video below, he was able to get within 3% of the physically measured depth — pretty impressive.

Of course, a few caveats apply. It’s important to use a dead-blow hammer to avoid ringing the steel well casing, which would muddle the return signal. You also might want to physically couple the phone to the well cap so it doesn’t bounce around too much; in the video it’s suggested a few bags filled with sand as ballast could be used to keep the phone in place. You also might get unwanted reflections from down-hole equipment such as the drop pipe or wires leading to the submersible pump.

Sources of error aside, this is a clever idea for a quick measurement that has the benefit of not needing to open the well. It’s also another clever use of Audacity to use sound to see the world around us in a different way.

Continue reading “Measuring A Well With Just A Hammer And A Smartphone” →

Minichord Wants To Help You Find Rad Chord Progressions

November 28, 2024 by 8 Comments

If you’re good at music theory, you can probably find all the chords and progressions you need just by using your fingers and a suitable instrument. For a lot of musicians, though, remembering huge banks of chords can be difficult, and experimenting with combinations can quickly become tedious and tiring. Enter the minichord, a tiny version of the Omnichord synth designed by [Benjamin] that offers to help out by putting all the chords you need a mere button press away.

The minichord is based around the Teensy 4.0, a capable microcontroller platform if ever there was one. It’s paired with a bunch of tactile buttons which are used to tell the Teensy which chord you desire to play. Various combinations of buttons can be used to play more advanced chords, too. There are potentiometers on board as well for volume control, as well as a touch pad for “strumming” arpeggios and other fine control tasks. An online interface allows modifying the presets onboard, too.

[Benjamin] hopes to get the minichord into production; it’s currently in a Seeedstudio competition that could see that happen, based on likes on the project video. The minichord isn’t the only player in this space, of course. The Orchard synth has been making similar waves this week. We’ve seen [Benjamin’s] work before, too. Video after the break. Continue reading “Minichord Wants To Help You Find Rad Chord Progressions” →

Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options

August 12, 2024 by 36 Comments

There are a ton of fun Raspberry Pi and Linux projects that require audio output – music players, talking robots, game consoles and arcades, intelligent assistants, mesh network walkie-talkies, and much more! There’s no shortage of Pi-based iPods out there, and my humble opinion is that we still could use more of them.

To help you in figuring out your projects, let’s talk about all the ways you can use to get audio out of a Pi or a similar SBC. Not all of them are immediately obvious and you ought to know the ropes before you implement one of them and get unpleasantly surprised by a problem you didn’t foresee. I can count at least five ways, and they don’t even include a GPIO-connected buzzer!

Let’s rank the different audio output methods, zoning in on things like their power consumption, and sort them by ease of implementation, and we’ll talk a bit about audio input options while we’re at it.

Continue reading “Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options” →

Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by 15 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

Continue reading “Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable” →

Reggaeton-Be-Gone Disconnects Obnoxious Bluetooth Speakers

February 23, 2024 by 29 Comments

If you’re currently living outside of a Spanish-speaking country, it’s possible you’ve only heard of the music genre Reggaeton in passing, if at all. In places with large Spanish populations, though, it would be more surprising if you hadn’t heard it. It’s so popular especially in the Carribean and Latin America that it’s gotten on the nerves of some, most notably [Roni] whose neighbor might not do anything else but listen to this style of music, which can be heard through the walls. To solve the problem [Roni] is now introducing the Reggaeton-Be-Gone. (Google Translate from Spanish)

Inspired by the TV-B-Gone devices which purported to be able to turn off annoying TVs in bars, restaurants, and other places, this device can listen to music being played in the surrounding area and identify whether or not it is hearing Reggaeton. It does this using machine learning, taking samples of the audio it hears and making decisions based on a trained model. When the software, running on a Raspberry Pi, makes a positive identification of one of these songs, it looks for Bluetooth devices in the area and attempts to communicate with them in a number of ways, hopefully rapidly enough to disrupt their intended connections.

In testing with [Roni]’s neighbor, the device seems to show promise although it doesn’t completely disconnect the speaker from its host, instead only interfering with it enough for the neighbor to change locations. Clearly it merits further testing, and possibly other models trained for people who use Bluetooth speakers when skiing, hiking, or working out. Eventually the code will be posted to this GitHub page, but until then it’s not the only way to interfere with your neighbor’s annoying stereo.

Thanks to [BaldPower] and [Alfredo] for the tips!

Localizing Fireworks Launches With A Raspberry Pi

December 30, 2023 by 103 Comments

If you have multiple microphones in known locations, and can determine the time a sound arrives at each one, you can actually determine the location that sound is coming from. This technique is referred to as sound localization via time difference of arrival. [Kim Hendrikse] decided to put the technique to good use to track down the location of illicit fireworks launches.

The build is based on the Raspberry Pi, with [Kim] developing an “autonomous recording unit” complete with GPS module for determining their location and keeping everything time synchronized. By deploying a number of these units, spread out over some distance, it’s possible to localize loud sounds based on the time stamps they show up in the recording on each unit.

Early testing took place with an air horn and four recording units. [Kim] found that the technique works best for sounds made within the polygon.  Determining the location was achieved with a sound investigation tool called Raven Lite, developed by Cornell University. The process is very manual, involving hunting for peaks in sound files, but we’d love to see a version that automated comparing sound peaks across many disparate recording units. In any case, it worked incredibly well for [Kim] in practice. Later testing with friends and a network of six recorders spread over Limburg, Netherlands, [Kim] was later able to localize fireworks launches with an accuracy down to a few meters.

Similar techniques are used to locate gunshots, and can work well with pretty much any loud noise that’s heard over a great distance. If you’ve been using your hacker skills to do similar investigative work, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

Digital Bike Horn Will Play Custom Sounds, Please Be Tasteful

December 23, 2023 by 19 Comments

When you’re out riding your bike, a horn can be a useful warning device to other road users and pedestrians alike. It can also be a source of fun and amusement, or annoyance, depending on the sounds it makes and how you use it. For the ultimate flexibility, you might like this digital bicycle horn that offers customizable sounds, as developed by [gokux].

The build has attractive two-tone components, consisting of a button pad for playing four sounds, and a sound module with a 3 watt speaker and battery pack. A Seeed Studio XIAO SAMD21 is the heart of the operation, with the microcontroller paired with a DFPlayer Mini which handles sound duties. When one of the four buttons is pressed, the microcontroller loads the relevant sound off an SD card, and plays it out over the speaker. For power, the build uses a lithium rechargeable battery with a healthy 1200 mAh capacity, which can be readily recharged thanks to a TP4056 charger module with a USB-C port.

It’s a nifty little build, and we love the Metal Gear Solid sounds. Though, we do wonder just how audible that 3 watt speaker is. If it proves inadequate, you could always step up to a much larger driver paired with a hefty audio amp if you so desire.

Continue reading “Digital Bike Horn Will Play Custom Sounds, Please Be Tasteful” →