This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)
https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke...
I think a few people have made homebrew versions too, like this one mentioned on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137584
fluke $25k
flir $10k
td2 $1k
These are the kinds of things you look at and think - maybe I DO need night-vision, or a soldering iron with a cpu, or a thermal imager, or a steerable endoscope or now an acoustic imager....
https://x.com/ThermoInstagram/status/909356506059026432
Also for checking if microwaved food is ready.
Priceless on one occasion for finding leaks in the ceiling, which are notoriously hard to pinpoint.
oooh my. My studfinder is always a little uncertain. I would love a second opinion.
Could one of these tools help map water pipe routes and trace a leak, or are they only going to be useful for air and gas leaks?
You should definitely try a thermal camera. Any moisture will create small temperature differences which are easily picked up by a thermal camera.
A leak only turns invisible if the water has the exact same temperature as the wall and there is no meaningful evaporation happening (as that cools the affected area).
Of course don't let me stop you from actively probing your all using RF. Though also there you might have good chances with IR, since wet $stuff should behave differently than dry $stuff ;-)
There is a man call leak detective, who hunts for leaks in the UK. one tool he has is shutting off the water and filling the pipes with gas and using either sound or gas detector to pin down leaks.
A lot of the time he just listens though.
Our ears and eyes are very high bandwidth sensors.
On balance, I would say this RF version was 200x harder.
You need really high clock rate sensing to differentiate the arrival time for sound from microphone arrays where they are all less than a nanosecond separated from each other.
Sensors around 12.5 inches apart will be a millisecond separated. The actual device was from a fuzzy recollection of a picture I saw, was probably 700 microseconds across. But it was a sphere with many sensor so adjacent sensors were less than .1 ms of separation. They would have all the time in the world to calibrate such a thing.
My guess is rather than triangulation, they probably just find the two microphones with the widest phase separarion between their signals and draw a line back between them. I don’t actually know how much 3D sonic math they’re doing.
What I do recall is that it was tech that had recently reached the Cheap Enough to Use status at the time, which is about 20 years ago now?
Very cool stuff, can be used for drone detection at up to 200m. Accuracy is not super good, unless you make mic spacing a bit large.
Making the hardware is fairly achievable without having to do fancy things. but if you want >8 channels you'll need to make some custom interface hardware.