Open Source Acoustic Drone Detection

Drones have become a potent military threat, particularly on the small scale. Nimble multi-rotor drones are fast, difficult to spot, and can cause plenty of harm if allowed to go …. Open Source Acoustic Drone Detection.

The first step to dealing with this issue is detection— a problem that [Agam Rossen] has put some work into. The result is VolAnti—an open-source drone detector. This route was chosen as a reliable way to detect incoming multi-rotors, since spinning propellers tend to create a telltale sound that can be plucked from the noise quite specifically.

In a world where fiber optic drones eschew RF emissions, it also proves particularly useful for early warning of such craft. VolAnti relies on a small four-microphone array, with the I2S output of all four mics summed together. The output is then fed into a 2048-point FFT running every 32 ms on an ESP32-S3.