fox-ear

Inspiration

We really wanted to come up with a project that could help in a real world situation. The string of tradegies sweeping the nation in the form of school related violence we believe could be potentially helped with the use of technology and coding, which is where we came up with Fox Ear.

What it does

Fox Ear detects spikes in amplitude across several nodes fitted with microphones and tagged with gps coordinates and locates origin of the sound. This can be used to guide users away from danger in the case of an emergency.

How we built it

We built Fox Ear by detecting audio cues with Python. When the amplitude reaches a certain value, the data recorded is sent to a server to alert users and to find the origin of the sound. This origin of the sound can be found using triangulation from the different nodes with microphones. Once a relative position is found, Fox Ear informs users of the location of danger and creates the safest plan of action.

Challenges we ran into

• Our triangulation methods had to be customized for acoustic triangulation, so we had to calculate a lot of complex equations
• Since laptop devices do not have directional compass support, testing was very difficult since we had to rely on using mobile devices.
• There were a lot of microphone discrepancies which made it difficult to accurately determine relative distances to sound sources
• Mobile browsers do not update and run our backend logic
• Mobile browsers are the only ones with compass support
• We couldn't use a ear-damaging loud sound in a hackathon environment, which also made testing more difficult.

Accomplishments we're proud of

• we can detect sound spikes
• we have the logic to triangulate from multiple sound sources
• we have the logic to point the user away from the sound sources
• our complicated mathematic techniques for determining various information from fuzzy data points

What's Next

We would like to use a uniform microphone across a distributed system to create a more standardized version of Fox Ear. The more nodes you have the more accurate readings you can have. We would create a better supported back end. In a different environment we would have better access to a more complete testing suite.

Built With

• html
• javascript
• php
• python