Meet Drone Shield, an Ambitious Idea For a $70 Drone Detection System 159
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an Interesting idea of how to use a Raspberry Pi and a few other inexpensive items to make a low cost detection system. From the article: 'The Drone Shield would combine a Raspberry Pi, a signal processor, a microphone, and analysis software to scan for specific audio signatures and compare them against what known drones sound like. (Because obviously a Predator drone is going to sound very different than a small quadcopter.) Once a match is found, the Drone Shield then sends an e-mail or SMS to its owner...'"
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Informative)
Ofcourse it's been done. There's a lot of military equipment that works like this.
Predators are so cheap, everyone can have one! (Score:0, Informative)
As a commercial sUAS operator, this is depressing. To think that Americans believe their lives are so interesting that the government would care to spy on them is downright unbelievable, and I think the person trying to sell these "Drone Shields" should be tried before the Supreme Court. It seems everyone is trying to get a scoop of the "drone pie" these days, be it news sources, "terrorists," police departments, or people trying to sell "drone detectors."
It just undermines the good uses for UAVs, which are environmental monitoring, disease spread reduction, and agriculture. All the media (including /.) cares about is selling some stupid sensational story about how "the government is going to spy on us and have guns pointed at us all the time with these here drones." If you're gullible enough to believe this BS, then do something about it! Don't just sit on your asses and whine like sick dogs.
This is obviously going to get downrated to oblivion since it's posted as AC, but screw it. Someone will read it.
Predators are so cheap, everyone can have one!
Re:Range (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer, I was a submarine crewman and though I was a qualified sonar watchstander I was not a sonar tech. I have also studied fairly widely in the unclassified literature.
It's certainly simple - in theory. In reality, picking out such a faint noise from the background is Very Difficult Indeed.
Processing power, both for signal analysis (finding the faint signal) and for beamforming is on the beginning of your problems. Let's just hit the high spots:
Etc... etc... The very definition of a non trivial project. You're essentially trying to replicate what the USN does with it's passive sonar systems, with dull and chipped stone knives. (You don't even have a bearskin. You don't even get a bearskin, just the aforementioned knives.)