danesolberg
commented
1 year ago I can work on putting a list together, but I feel like improvements are needed before it's viable. My testing environment was flawed, also, because I think my neighbors truly didn't even notice the big thumps on their floor...
The biggest problems with the current design are that 1) it doesn't isolate human noise well from natural vibrations and resonance in the building itself. I think a Fourier analysis could be helpful, with a simple learning algorithm to tag noises you care about as you hear them so the device can learn what frequencies to respond to. For example, a washer/dryer upstairs can trigger false positives because they transfer vibrations into the building frame; 2) this is where I considered the project overkill, but it realistically needs a mesh network of devices listening for bangs and thumps in separate rooms. The problem is that loud noises from the ceiling often are amplified in the floor below by essentially a tympanic effect of the ceiling resonating from the noise above (the thump isn't loud to the neighbors above, but super loud to the people below). I think because of this, if you are measuring vibrations in the ceiling, you have a hard time picking them up from different rooms from where the thump originated. I looked into cheap Bluetooth low energy devices that could communicate with each other in a mesh to a central thumper, and the software is already available for this, but I didn't get around to it 😆
I would love to use your project but I'm so new to hardware I definitely need a component list and schematic. 😅 How has it been working so far?