"Marco Polo" Audio Locator

Inspiration

Audio locators have been used to great effect in history, and we were interested in replicating this device.

What it does

It triangulates sound using three microphones and through some mathematical equations is able to determine the direction the sound came from based on the order of each microphone hit.

How we built it

We used a bandpass filter, non-inverting amplifiers, and comparators to process the output of the microphone before sending it to code to be processed.

Challenges we ran into

Interrupts and how to effectively control them to ensure each would be triggered and only once. In addition, figuring out hardware issues we ran into such as finding out our OpAmp was limited by the reference voltage. To get around this, we used the higher voltage source on the Arduino.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to display the proper showing lines on the LCD screen!

What we learned

We learned a lot about circuit design and how much a microphone signal needed to be worked on before it can be used in code. Noisy signals was a huge factor in how well our design worked.