Low cost Raspberry Pi based portable gunshot locator | Hacker News Reader

Low cost Raspberry Pi based portable gunshot locator

github.com

3 pointshcfman3 comments

Cheap Raspberry Pi based Sound Localizer. It was initially just going to be a sound recorder but then I discovered that by adding a GPS to it I can make the system time accurate within less than a microsecond of error. Then after hearing some unexplained local explosions I thought of sound localization. Then I discovered bio-acoustic research and the whole world of wild life preservation and wildlabs.net.

5x months later, this pops out. Installs and configures completely with just one command including partitioning changes. And sound localizes with just one command from a docker image on docker.io.

Total cost, less than 100 euros.

Now I would like to encourage the community to develop the next step towards an anti-poaching solution. Specifically, automatic gunshot event start time locator runnable on a raspberry pi, towards an automated anti-poaching solution.

I'd thought about working on this myself after hearing about "ShotSpotter" on the YouTube channel "Live on Patrol". That company apparently charges quite a bit for those and it seemed to me that using an RPi would be a lot less expensive, so it's great to see you've actually done the work on this.

I live a rural area surrounded by public land and lots of hunters so hearing gunshots is common because there's almost always some kind of game in season, and fireworks are common as well because those are legal all year long here as well.

I found this awhile back: https://www.best-microcontroller-projects.com/sound-origin-d..., but I've not tried to set it up.

I have a few old RPi boards so I'll see if I can get this up and running.

Nice to hear! I can be reached on the wildlabs.net community, love to hear how you get on and help out if necessary. I'll be writing some more in depth articles on how it's used. But that example on github is essentially the result of my field test.

It was quite challenging. There are several articles online about how to use a GPS to get really accurate time however, once you disconnect from the network it didn't work. What none of them said was that the default configuration of chrony and gpsmon resulted in the incorrect start order, so gpsmon was failing to communicate with chrony via shared memory. I solved a bunch of other problems as well.

And... I managed to find a way to shrink the installed file system so I could create new partitions on the same Raspberry Pi, without requiring another computer. A result that allowed me to make the full installation and configuration happen with one command only. Many people would be put off if another computer was needed for partitioning.

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