ultrasonic

118 Articles

Identifying Creatures That Go Chirp In The Night

September 8, 2020 by 26 Comments

It’s common knowledge that bats navigate and search for their prey using echolocation, but did you know that the ultrasonic chips made by different species of bats are distinct enough that they can be used for identification? [Tegwyn☠Twmffat] did, which is why he came up with this impressive device capable of cataloging the different bats flying around at night.

Now this might seem like an odd gadget to have, but if you’re in the business of wildlife conservation, it’s not hard to imagine how this sort of capability might be useful. This device could be used to easily estimate the size and diversity of bat populations in a particular area. [Tegwyn☠Twmffat] also mentions that, at least in theory, the core concept should work with other types of noisy critters like rodents or dolphins.

Powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, the unit listens with a high-end ultrasonic microphone for the telltale chirps of bats. These are then processed by the software and compared to a database of samples that [Tegwyn☠Twmffat] personally collected in local nature reserves. In the video after the break, you can also see how he uses a set of house keys jingling as a control to make sure the system is running properly.

As winner of the Train All the Things contest back in April, we’re eager to see how the Intelligent Wildlife Species Detector will fare as the competition heats up in the 2020 Hackaday Prize.

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Faux Radar Uses Ultrasound & Python

July 18, 2020 by 25 Comments

Radars are simply cool, and their portrayal in movies and TV has a lot to do with that. You get a sweet glowing screen that shows you where the bad guys are, and a visual representation of your missiles on their way to blow them up. Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, day to day life for most of us is a little less exhilarating. We can make do with a facsimile of the experience instead.

The project consists of an Arduino Uno outfitted with an ultrasound module that can do basic range measurements on the order of tens of centimeters. The module is then placed on a servo and scanned through a 180 degree rotation. This data is passed back to a computer running a Python application, which plots the results on a Plan Position Indicator, or PPI – the sweeping display we’re all so familiar with.

While it’s unlikely you’ll be using such a setup to engage bandits, it could prove as a useful module for robot navigation or similar applications. We’ve seen ultrasonic transducers used for exactly that. Video after the break.

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Hack Together Your Own Bat Signal

July 11, 2020 by 27 Comments

Bats use echolocation to see objects in front of them. They emit an ultrasonic pulse around 20 kHz (and up to 100 kHz) and then sense the pulses as they reflect off an object and back to the bat. It’s the same type of mechanism used by ultrasonic proximity sensors for object-avoidance. Humans (except perhaps the very young ones) can’t hear the ultrasonic pulses since the frequency is too high, but an inexpensive microphone in a simple bat detector could. As it turns out bat detectors are available off the shelf, but where’s the fun in that? So, like any good hacker, [WilkoL] decided to build his own.

[WilkoL’s] design is composed primarily of an electret microphone, microphone preamplifier, CD4040 binary counter, LM386 audio amplifier, and a speaker. Audio signals are analog and their amplitudes vary based on how close the sound is to the microphone. [WilkoL] wanted to pick up bat sounds as far away as possible, so he cranked up the gain of the microphone preamplifier by quite a bit, essentially railing the amplifiers. Since he mostly cares about the frequency of the sound and not the amplitude, he wasn’t concerned about saturating the transistor output.

The CD4040 then divides the signal by a factor of 16, generating an output signal within the audible frequency range of the human ear. A bat signal of 20 kHz divides down to 1.25 kHz and a bat signal of up to 100 kHz divides down to 6.25 kHz.

He was able to test his bat detector with an ultrasonic range finder and by the noise generated from jingling his keychain (apparently there are some pretty non-audible high-frequency components from jingling keys). He hasn’t yet been able to get a recording of his device picking up bats. It has detected bats on a number of occasions, but he was a bit too late to get it on video.

Anyway, we’re definitely looking forward to seeing the bat detector in action! Who knows, maybe he’ll find Batman.

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Contactless Doorbell Built To Avoid Coronavirus

June 4, 2020 by 15 Comments

It’s often said that necessity breeds creativity, and during a global pandemic such words have proved truer than ever. Realising the common doorbell could be a potential surface transmission point for coronavirus, [CasperHuang] whipped up a quick build.

The build eschews the typical pushbutton we’re all familiar with. Instead, it relies on an ultrasonic distance sensor to detect a hand (or foot) waved in front of the door. An Arduino Leonardo runs the show, sounding a buzzer when the ultrasonic sensor is triggered. In order to avoid modifying the apartment door, the build is housed in a pair of cardboard boxes, taped to the base of the door, with wires passing underneath.

It’s a tidy way to handle contactless deliveries. We imagine little touches like this may become far more common in future design, as the world learns lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Every little bit helps, after all. Video after the break.

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Social Distancing Headgear For The Futuristically Inclined

June 2, 2020 by 24 Comments

Those of you with an eye to classic cinema will remember 1985’s Back To The Future, and particularly its scientist character Dr. Emmett Brown. When the protagonist Marty McFly finds himself in 1955, on his first meeting with they younger Dr. Brown the latter is wearing an experimental helmet designed to read thoughts. It doesn’t work, but it’s an aesthetic we’re reminded of in [Håkan Lidbo]’s Corona Hat, a social distancing tool that incorporates distance sensors into a piece of headgear.

The device is simple enough, half of a globe fitted with a set of car reversing sensors and the battery from an autonomous vacuum cleaner. It’s sprayed a bright orange, and worn on the head as he walks around town in the video below the break. It beeps any time something or somebody gets too close, and as far as we can see it’s effective in what it does. We are not so sure about the look though, to us as well as Emmett Brown it’s a little too reminiscent of the character Sheev in the 2005 Dukes of Hazzard movie who wore an armadillo’s armour as a hat. Perhaps more conventional headgear as a basis might gain it a few fewer askance looks.

This isn’t the first ultrasonic social distancing sensor we’ve seen. Probably the most noteworthy project in this arena though has to be the one with the high voltage that scares more with its bark than its bite.

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Ultrasonic Sound Gun Precisely Aims Your Music

April 30, 2020 by 25 Comments

When listening to music you sometimes cannot avoid the situation where other people get annoyed because they feel it disrupts their important doings or they do not share your taste in avant-garde doom metal. Of course one could just use headphones. But a hackier way would be to build a parametric speaker that focuses soundwaves into a narrow beam like [Shane] did with this ultrasonic sound gun.

As the directivity of a soundwave depends on the size of the source and its frequency, a directed beam can practically only be achieved with ultrasound. Even though we are not able to perceive frequencies above ~20 kHz, the nonlinear properties of air make it possible to hear the audio modulated onto an ultrasonic carrier signal. For his sound gun [Shane] was inspired by another parametric speaker project. It took him some time to get the 555 timer circuit oscillating at the right frequency and he fried a cheap Bluetooth audio module while trying to increase the output volume but in the end, he managed to get everything working. As the project name suggests, he also 3D printed a gun-shaped enclosure. The video below shows that the sound from the gun behaves really similar to a beam of light and can, for example, be bounced off other objects.

If you are looking for other inspiration there is a whole list of cool ultrasonic projects from distance sensors to acoustic levitation.

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Slippy Slapper Uselessly Uses All The Arduinos

March 13, 2020 by 8 Comments

Want to take that annoyingly productive coworker down a notch? Yeah, us too. How dare they get so much done and be so happy about it? How is it possible that they can bang on that keyboard all day when you struggle to string together an email?

The Slippy Slapper is a useless machine that turns people into useless machines using tactics like endless distraction and mild physical violence. It presses your buttons by asking them to press buttons for no reason other than killing their productivity. When they try to walk away, guess what? That’s another slappin’. Slippy Slapper would enrage us by proxy if he weren’t so dang cute.

You’re right, you don’t need an Arduino for this. For peak inefficiency and power consumption, you actually need four of them. One acts as the master, and bases its commands to the other three on the feedback it gets from Slippy’s ultrasonic nostrils. The other three control the slappin’ servos, the speakers, and reading WAV files off of the SD card. Slap your way past the break to see Slippy Slapper’s slapstick demo.

Need to annoy a group of coworkers all at once? Slip a big bank of useless machines into the conference room while it’s being set up.

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