Setting the Stage for Open Source Sonar Development
At Hackaday, we see community-driven open source development as the great equalizer. Whether it’s hardware or software — if there’s some megacorp out there trying to sell you something, you should have the option to go with a comparable open source version. Even if the commercial offering is objectively superior, it’s important that open source alternatives always exist, or else its the users themselves that end up becoming the product before too long.
So we were particularly excited when [Neumi] wrote in to share his Open Echo project, as it contains some very impressive work towards democratizing the use of sonar. Over the years we’ve seen a handful of underwater projects utilize sonar in some form or another, but they have always simply read the data from a commercial, and generally expensive, unit. But Open Echo promises to delete the middle-man, allowing for cheaper and more flexible access to bathymetric data.
The project started with the reverse engineering of a cheap commercial fish finder, which gave [Neumi] first-hand experience with driving ultrasonic transducers and interpreting the signal they return. Further research lead him to the Texas Instruments TUSS4470, a ultrasonic sensor IC that can do much of the heavy lifting. He spun up an Arduino shield using this chip, and wrote the necessary code to interface directly with a commercial transducer.
This is already a huge milestone for DIY sonar, but [Neumi] isn’t stopping there. The newest iteration of the hardware is designed not just to work with commercial transducers, but can be used with home-built ones as well. While the project isn’t complete, he’s made some very rapid progress as demonstrated in the video below.
We’ve covered a number of projects over the years that involved reading the depth of body of water, and this project would have been able to make each one of them cheaper and easier accomplish. While admittedly not every hacker is keen to map the bottom of their local waterway, we know there is a niche group out there that have been waiting a long time for a project like this to come around.
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