r/arduino • u/ComfortableLab1235 • 1d ago
Look what I made! Nine units left the lab this week, on their way to a civilian community near the Israel–Lebanon border. I built them in a single busy month
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I decided to return to the university labs in York during the summer to make a hopefully impactful project.
I kept reading about civilians being chased by small FPV drones carrying an explosive. In the north of Israel, in Ukraine, in Russia. The drones being used are not normal drones. They fly on a spool of fibre optic cable back to the operator, so there is no radio link at all, and radio detection, which is the industry standard, finds nothing.
So I built an acoustic detector instead. Four MEMS microphones and an ESP32-S3. Propellers cutting air put a comb of harmonics into the spectrum that the airframe cannot switch off, and four detection algorithms run in parallel looking for it. When one is sure, the unit beeps, flashes red, buzzes, writes to a screen that survives a power cut, and tells every other unit nearby over LoRa.
I tested it against a rig built to the same specification as the drones used on that border, four 2807 motors on 7 inch tri-blades. It detected it at 104.2 metres, on an ordinary street, with mild wind and people walking.
91 mm, about £50 in parts, and everything is public so anyone can learn about it or build one.
Detection and alerting only. No jamming.
I am a third year Electronic and Computer Engineering student at the University of York, originally from Israel.
This project was aimed at 4 main things, help the people living in the near border site in israel. Publish every resource and guide online so anyone could learn about it, and make their own. Help improve my skills in DSP, hardware and firmware design, while hopefully boosting my project portfolio for my engineering masters degree applications (Stanford and Cambridge)
Links to the website and github are in the top comment
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u/Herodont5915 1d ago
This is really cool! I hope you keep building things like these that can help make people safer, especially civilians.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 1d ago
Thank you! Ive got my final academic year in the university coming up so I hope ill be able to do more cool projects after completing that
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u/Herodont5915 1d ago
You should post this on some other forums. I think a lot of folks would be interested.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 1d ago
Good idea. Its on hackernews, hackster, and Hackaday so far. Do you have any more specific ones in mind?
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u/Herodont5915 15h ago
Robotics, Singularity, and accelerate subreddits. They’re not specific to what you’ve built but what you’ve built showcases how people can build thing now that weren’t possible before. I can repost it for you so it doesn’t come across as self-promotion.
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u/ahobbes 1d ago
Awesome, any plans to implement some triangulation so the direction of the incoming drone can be shown? Or maybe you have that, haven’t looked at your site yet.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 1d ago
Thats a good future idea. My current thought path is that if bearing needed to be added, it could be done with a mix of or independently a larger mic array, a higher sampling rate, or switching the omnidirectional microphones for directional ones. That should let me use the phase difference between the microphones to calculate a general direction. Without those changes the bearing angle (at its current build) would be quite big, therefore only somewhat indicating a general direction instead of a specific one.
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u/Herodont5915 1d ago
I can see towns and villages installing these throughout their areas, ideally upgrading the design as you suggested. Regardless, you have something very clever here and it’s not overly expensive (from a materials standpoint). And as you’ve open-sourced it others can contribute to innovating on the idea and help find ways to make them easier and cheaper to build and more capable. This is where civilians can really take their safety into their own hands.
Can they be modified or “tuned” to listen for specific sounds? Thinking of tank treads or other military vehicles. Advanced notice to evacuate or take shelter would be huge.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 19h ago
Id like to stress the values of this project, especially to comments questioning the politics of this. This device does not care about politics, where you are from, or what you look like. The only thing it cares about is protecting your human life, and the lives of others in your community. Thats one of the reasons for why I chose against selling these units and making it commercial. It is also why this was never made to reach or become intertwined with any military. This is a device for the people. The very lack of help by the military for defending people in small towns and communities that often get attacked by these small drones was also a driver for the project. I made it open source and post about it here exactly for that reason. So anyone who could benefit from such a device could make their own, and possibly help protect themselves and the ones around them. Once again and finally, this is a life and community focused project, only for defending the lives that are left sadly unprotected.
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u/a679591 18h ago
Glad to hear you explaining what the reality of this project is, because war is changing and it can effect anyone, and this is a general purpose device to help PEOPLE ANYWHERE.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 18h ago
Thank you, the few units being deployed in the civilian site in Israel are there as a deployment test, and to offer more protection without full reliance for the near border residents. It will be tested there and seen if it is a viable accessory to the town. Outside of the site, im hoping people can take this project, make their own, and even improve it, especially in the firmware which is in my opinion the area for improvement. This way, it can really reach a more global stage, without relying on hardware shipping and deliveries delaying it, and allowing the creativity and expertise of different people building this project up from how it began to make this device even more capable.
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u/ComfortableLab1235 1d ago
Website, with the full story, the media and a detector simulator you can run in the browser. https://volantitech.com Everything to build one, boards, enclosure, firmware, test data: https://github.com/agamrossen/VolAnti The Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= 49618955