Over the last year I’ve been working towards an underwater sonar system for ROVs and surface boats. In order to learn the basic signal processing required to detect the echoes, I initially got a simple sonar working in air with a desktop conferencing USB speaker/mic running on Windows. A writeup, including source, is here. That article describes the algorithms used in detail and would be a good read if you want the details of how this works.
The next logical step seemed to be to get it working on a microcontroller. There are plenty of low cost ultrasonic sonar modules available that work really well in air, but the idea was to work towards getting a sonar that worked in water. There are currently no low cost sonar modules for hobby use in water. Additionally, the low cost modules only give one echo – with a signal processing approach like this, you get a series of echoes that may convey more information about the environment. As an example, a boat floating above a school of fish could detect both the fish and the bottom.
I selected a Stellaris Launchpad because of the high speed analog to digital converters (ADC) and the 32 Kof RAM. At the required sample rates, the Launchpad has just enough RAM to send a chirp, and then record a fraction of a second of audio so that the echoes can be determined. Higher frequency sound will require a higher sampling rate, so I may need to switch to a Teensy 3.1, which has 64K of RAM.
A chirp waveform is computed and sent to a small piezo speaker driven by a simple transistor circuit. The piezo supply voltage (VCC in the diagram below) is provided by 3 nine-volt batteries in series to obtain 27V. This diagram shows how it is connected. This is not my diagram – I found it online, but I don’t have a reference. If this is yours, please drop me a line.
For More Details: Audible Frequency Chirp Sonar with the Stellaris Launchpad
