Scalable distributed ultrasonic microphone array
Annemarie Surlykke Tórur Andreassen, John C. T. Hallam · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
A modular approach to recording airborne ultrasound will be presented, the solution is based as much as possible, on retail components and open source software. The modular design, where each module has approx. 4 microphones, allows modules to be combined to extend the coverage area or get higher recording resolution. The system has been designed to have no inherent scalability limits, i.e., only limited by data storage available and the number of microphones you can get a hold of. Current implementation has been used for recording in field experiments with bats, both short-term (minutes) on BCI Panama and for long-term recording (months) in Denmark. The generic nature of the design and implementation allows us to easily replace old components with new technology as it becomes available, both hardware and software. This means we reap the benefits achieved by the electronics industry and also gain any software improvements/bugfixes by a simple Internet upgrade of the module software. Modular design introduces some extra complexity, but this is only an issue when real-time processing the data, or with regards to synchronization. Although said complexity also has advantages, one of them being the possibility of parallel processing.