During disassembly of some old CD/DVD drives, I stumbled across a pair of *really* beautiful laser diodes. Not much use for them right now, except practicing macro shooting – pretty hard to get good pictures of the structures inside and the dichroitic filter blue at the same time.
A few days ago, a friend came over to talk about some microcontroller related projects. One of the topics was distance sensing, or rather proximity/movement sensing with low technical effort.
The basic idea was to detect movement of an object or person within a short distance to trigger events. Typical sensors for this kind of application would be passive infrared (PIR) modules, radiowave sensors (microwave or radar) or active infrared distance sensors. All of these can be quite pricey, perhaps with the exception of the PIR, which cannot detect objects very well.
So, I thought about how the goal could be accomplished with standard parts. Active infrared is the most simple choice. Continue reading
So…it’s been a while. Somehow I thought, I’d have finished the CNC writeup by now, as well as my plans for continuing work on my plasma-bar meter project. Things turned out different.
I got into my Bachelor’s thesis after completing the preceding seminars, which kept me busy since june ’13. The topic is centered around signal power based speech DOA estimation using directional microphones, very interesting stuff from the domain of signals processing. I had a very interesting time learning lots of new things, and somehow I also wanted to get hands-on with the matter since attending several advanced DSP courses during the last two terms.
While working on the thesis, I realized that microphone array systems are really nice things to have to play around with. I decided to make my own, which I did in my free time in parallel to the thesis. Let me at least show some pictures as long as I still don’t get around to working on other stuff.
A few technical details follow below.