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Category Archives: sonar
Hide Silent, Hide Deep: Submarine Tracking Technologies of the Cold War
All through the cold war, there was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse in play. Nuclear powers like the United States and the Soviet Union would hide submarines armed with nuclear missiles underwater. The other side would try to know where they were so they could be targeted in …read more
Posted in cia, classified, cold war, Featured, history, Original Art, sonar, sosus, submarine
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Submarine to Plane: Can You Hear Me Now? The Hydrophone Radar Connection
How does a submarine talk to an airplane? It sounds like a bad joke but it’s actually a difficult engineering challenge.
Traditionally the submarine must surface or get shallow enough to deploy a communication buoy. That communication buoy uses the same type of radio technology as planes. But submarines often rely on acoustic transmissions via hydrophones which is fancy-talk for putting speakers and microphones in the water as transmitters and receivers. This is because water is no friend to radio signals, especially high frequencies. MIT is developing a system which bridges this watery gap and it relies on acoustic transmissions …read more
Posted in communication, millimeter, radar, radio, radio hacks, sonar, sound, sound wave, translation, waves
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Sonar in Your Hand
Sonar measures distance by emitting a sound and clocking how long it takes the sound to travel. This works in any medium capable of transmitting sound such as water, air, or in the case of FingerPing, flesh and bone. FingerPing is a project at Georgia Tech headed by [Cheng Zhang] which measures hand position by sending soundwaves through the thumb and measuring the time on four different receivers. These readings tell which bones the sound travels through and allow the device to figure out where the thumb is touching. Hand positions like this include American Sign Language one through ten. …read more
Posted in ASL, gesture, gesture recognition, hand, handhelds hacks, peripherals hacks, sonar, wearable, wearable hacks
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Ultrasonic Array Gets Range Data Fast and Cheap
How’s your parallel parking? It’s a scenario that many drivers dread to the point of avoidance. But this 360° ultrasonic sensor will put even the most skilled driver to shame, at least those who pilot tiny remote-controlled cars.
Watch the video below a few times and you’ll see that within the limits of the test system, [Dimitris Platis]’ “SonicDisc” sensor does a pretty good job of nailing the parallel parking problem, a driving skill so rare that car companies have spent millions developing vehicles that do it for you. The essential task is good spatial relations, and that’s where SonicDisc …read more
Posted in i2c, parallel parking, ranging, robots hacks, self-driving, sonar, transportation hacks, ultrasonic
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Quick Hack Cleans Data from Sump Pump
Nobody likes to monitor things as much as a hacker, even mundane things like sump pumps. And hackers love clean data too, so when [Felix]’s sump pump water level data was made useless by a new pump controller, he just knew he had to hack the controller to clean up his data.
Monitoring a sump pump might seem extreme, but as a system that often protects against catastrophic damage, the responsible homeowner strives to take care of it. [Felix] goes a bit further than the average homeowner, though, with an ultrasonic sensor to continually measure the water level in the …read more
Posted in home hacks, level, pump, sonar, sump pump, ultrasonic
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Octosonar is 8X Better than Monosonar
The HC-SR04 sonar modules are available for a mere pittance and, with some coaxing, can do a pretty decent job of helping your robot measure the distance to the nearest wall. But when sellers on eBay are shipping these things in ten-packs, why would you stop at mounting just one or two on your ‘bot? Octosonar is a hardware and Arduino software library that’ll get you up and running with up to eight sonar sensors in short order.
Octosonar uses an I2C multiplexer to send the “start” trigger pulses, and an eight-way OR gate to return the “echo” signal back …read more
Posted in i2c, multiplex, multiplexing, robot, robots hacks, sonar
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Litter Basket Automation
Sometimes the technology part of a project isn’t the hard part. It is having an idea for something both useful and doable. Sure, a robot butler that would do your cleaning and laundry would be useful, but might be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, there’s only so many use cases for another blinking LED.
[Martinhui] knows how to use an ultrasonic sensor with an Arduino. Driving a motor isn’t that hard, either. The question is: what do you do with that? [Martin’s] answer: Automate a trash can. You can see a video of the …read more
Posted in sonar, stepper motor, trash can
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