stereo

67 Articles

Binaural Hearing Modeled With An Arduino

November 16, 2021 by 15 Comments

You don’t have two ears by accident. [Stoppi] has a great post about this, along with a video you can see below. (The text is in German, but that’s what translation is for.) The point to having two ears is that you receive audio information from slightly different angles and distances in each ear and your amazing brain can deduce a lot of spatial information from that data.

For the Arduino demonstration, cheap microphone boards take the place of your ears. A servo motor points to the direction of sound. This would be a good gimmick for a Halloween prop or a noise-sensitive security camera.

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Stereo Recording Made Easy With A 3D-Printed Mount

August 1, 2021 by 15 Comments

When making a recording it can be surprisingly difficult to capture a good stereo image. A well-known technique is the ORTF microphone arrangement in which two cardoid microphones sit at 110 degrees to each other and 17cm apart, and thus pick up a readily reproducible stereo separation. It’s something that we’ve been known to do in our student days with a pair of Shure SM58s and a stack of Post Office elastic bands, but [marsairforce] has done a much nicer job with a very neat 3D-printed microphone clip.

Designed in OpenSCAD, the first iteration printed on a resin printer proved to be too brittle for the task, so a second version was printed on an FDM machine. This incorporated significant strengthening, as well as a screw mount for a microphone stand. The result is an extremely useful and cheap addition to any recording set-up, and anyone who has wrestled with achieving a good stereo image will appreciate it. You can see some of what went into it in the video below the break.

If this is your field of interest, you might also wish to look at a binaural microphone.

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Motorized Magic Over HDMI

October 19, 2020 by 13 Comments

There is a certain warmth that seems to emanate from stereo receivers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Despite their large footprint and considerable heft, the soft glow of the indicator lights and solid kerthunk of switches provide a sense of coziness. When [Tom] recently swapped his receiver for a 1970s Pioneer SX-950, he found himself getting up from the couch to adjust the volume when watching TV far too often for his liking. Resolving to do something about it, he added some magic in the form of a motorized volume knob. One of the coolest tricks for stereos was to have a small motor attached to the volume knob so that it could turn the volume up or down via a remote.

The first obstacle came when [Tom] had to forgo the center tap on the potentiometer to get a motorized one. This meant the volume compensation feature would be disabled, which is but a small price to pay for convenience. After scouring the internet, he finally had the part in hand only to discover some troublesome capacitors in the way. The new pot had a rather large motor hanging off the back that the previous one didn’t have. Fortunately, there was a good bit of space between the PCB and the bottom of the chassis, so Tom was able to just flip the capacitors to the underside of the board and bend them on their sides.

The next problem to solve was how to change the volume remotely. IR was considered as well as optical cable control signals. What [Tom] did instead was to implement HDMI CEC (consumer electronics control). CEC was well documented and seemed simple to implement on an ATTINY4313 with the help of a half-H driver. The CEC protocol implemented by [Tom’s] TV seemed to be very sensitive to timing, so an external crystal was used to get more precise timing and additional handshaking was implemented to get the TV to accept the microcontroller as valid. A few fail-safes were added to make sure the motor didn’t burn out if something went wrong with the CEC protocol and a nice enclosure wrapped up the build quite nicely.

We’ve seen CEC implemented before on a PIC 18F87J50, but as a sender of CEC commands not a receiver. [Tom’s] code is available on GitHub and might prove useful if you’re looking to implement CEC on an AVR.

Thanks [Tom] for sending this one in!

Quadcopter With Stereo Vision

June 30, 2020 by 5 Comments

Flying a quadcopter or other drone can be pretty exciting, especially when using the video signal to do the flying. It’s almost like a real-life video game or flight simulator in a way, except the aircraft is physically real. To bring this experience even closer to the reality of flying, [Kevin] implemented stereo vision on his quadcopter which also adds an impressive amount of functionality to his drone.

While he doesn’t use this particular setup for drone racing or virtual reality, there are some other interesting things that [Kevin] is able to do with it. The cameras, both ESP32 camera modules, can make use of their combined stereo vision capability to determine distances to objects. By leveraging cloud computing services from Amazon to offload some of the processing demands, the quadcopter is able to recognize faces and keep the drone flying at a fixed distance from that face without needing power-hungry computing onboard.

There are a lot of other abilities that this drone unlocks by offloading its resource-hungry tasks to the cloud. It can be flown by using a smartphone or tablet, and has its own web client where its user can observe the facial recognition being performed. Presumably it wouldn’t be too difficult to use this drone for other tasks where having stereoscopic vision is a requirement.

Thanks to [Ilya Mikhelson], a professor at Northwestern University, for this tip about a student’s project.

Machine Vision Keeps Track Of Grubby Hands

April 7, 2020 by 4 Comments

Can you remember everything you’ve touched in a given day? If you’re being honest, the answer is, “Probably not.” We humans are a tactile species, with an outsized proportion of both our motor and sensory nerves sent directly to our hands. We interact with the world through our hands, and unfortunately that may mean inadvertently spreading disease.

[Nick Bild] has a potential solution: a machine-vision system called Deep Clean, which monitors a scene and records anything in it that has been touched. [Nick]’s system uses Jetson Xavier and a stereo camera to detect depth in a scene; he built his camera from a pair of Raspberry Pi cams and a Pi 3B+, but other depth cameras like a Kinect could probably do the job. The idea is to watch the scene for human hands — OpenPose is the tool he chose for that job — and correlate their depth in the scene with the depth of objects. Touch a doorknob or a light switch, and a marker is left on the scene. The idea would be that a cleaning crew would be able to look at the scene to determine which areas need extra attention. We can think of plenty of applications that extend beyond the current crisis, as the ability to map areas that have been touched seems to be generally useful.

[Nick] has been getting some mileage out of that Xavier lately — he’s used it to build an AI umpire and shades that help you find lost stuff. Who knows what else he’ll find to do with them during this time of confinement?

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Professional Audio On An ESP32

October 6, 2019 by 53 Comments

Audiophiles have worked diligently to alert the rest of the world to products with superior sound quality, and to warn us away from expensive gimmicks that have middling features at best. Unfortunately, the downside of most high quality audio equipment is the sticker price. But with some soldering skills and a bit of hardware, you can build your own professional-level audio equipment around an ESP32 and impress almost any dedicated audiophile.

The list of features the tiny picoAUDIO board packs is impressive, starting with a 3.7 watt stereo amplifier and a second dedicated headphone amplifier. It also has all of the I/O you would expect something based on an ESP32 to have, such as I2S stereo DAC, an I2S microphone input, I2C GPIO extenders and, of course, a built-in MicroSD card reader. The audio quality is impressive too, and the project page has some MP3 files of audio recorded using this device that are worth listening to.

Whether you want the highest sound quality for your headphones while you listen to music, or you need a pocket-sized audio recording device, this might be the way to go. The project files are all available so you can build this from the ground up as well. Once you have that knocked out, you can move on to building your own speakers.

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Does This Timber Have The Right Timbre?

July 27, 2019 by 20 Comments

A hi-fi amplifier used to be a rite of passage for the home electronic constructor, back in the days when consumer electronics was still dominated by analogue entertainment. It’s unusual then to see [carbono.silício]’s stereo amplifier project, constructed in an open-wire circuit sculpture form on a log. You didn’t read that incorrectly, it’s built not on a breadboard but on a piece of Olea Maderensis, or Madiera Olive wood, complete with bark. This endangered tree was not felled, instead it was a piece blown down after a storm.

The circuit is slightly unusual for a project such as this, in that it uses a pair of LM386 audio amplifier chips. This isn’t an unusual component, but it’s one more commonly seen providing the amplification for a small speaker project than in a stereo hi-fi amplifier. But the construction is beautifully done, with very neatly routed wires, a single central volume knob, and a blue LED power light. A particularly nice touch are the aluminium electrolytic capacitors, we suspect having had their plastic sleeving removed.

We’ve had our share of stereo amp projects here, and some of them are surprisingly simple. We have even been known to partake of them ourselves.