Development of Wireless Sensing Unit for Environmental Noise Monitoring
Taylor Rink · Hope College Digital Commons (Hope College) · 2018
Locations with large amounts of environmental noise can raise stress and blood pressure, as well as decrease productivity, for all peoples subjected to it. In order to better quantify these noise levels, it is important to fully understand the patterns and levels of noise through data collection and analysis. Wireless sensor networks offer one method for autonomously gathering and processing levels of noise pollution in densely populated areas. In this study, a wireless sensing unit (WSU) was developed that was capable of collecting and transmitting noise data. This WSU was comprised of a Teensy microcontroller development system, a sound detecting board, and an XBee wireless transceiver. In order to capture the auditory range that a human can hear, the WSU had to sample at 20kHz, resulting in a large accumulation of data that must be stored locally and eventually transmitted. Due to the constraints of the system, it was found that nodes would spend approximately eight times longer transmitting data than collecting data, making this not scalable for long time periods or large sensor networks. In order to limit this amount of transmitted data, on-board signal processing techniques of the noise signal were explored.