Monitor your noisy neighbours with Edge Impulse

Working Project

If you wish to see a working demonstration, forward wind to 3:27 in the video below.

Why build a noise monitor?

All of us, have either experienced or know someone who has experienced difficulties with neighbours. Neighbours aren’t just people who live right next door to you, they are people who are close by, such as a company or in my case, a new police station.

Since the police station opened, we have noticed an increase in emergency sirens and emergency vehicles driving at speed down our road. This wasn’t supposed to happen, as when planning consent was granted for the new station, assurances were made that the local community would not be affected by it.

We fully appreciate they have jobs to do and of course, should we call upon the services ourselves, we would want them to be there for us. However, from what I understand, primarily due to cost savings, a variety of small police stations were closed and this new larger station opened. This isn’t fair to this local community, especially considering the earlier promises that we wouldn’t be affected.

After speaking to a local official, they too had received many complaints about it and comments were made about monitoring the events. The last thing I wanted to do was to run to a notepad every time we heard a siren, so I decided to build a siren monitor.

It is during my research, I realised how many people would like to track, sirens, dogs, music, arguments, ventilation noises from restaurants and so on. This design is flexible enough, that all of these scenarios could be monitored.

Edge Impulse

It turns out, that identifying particular noises is a complex matter. I thought it would be easy to look for a pattern, using low and high pass filters, but I was at a loss, until that is, I came across Edge Impulse and my world changed.

Using their cloud platform, I quickly established they had a default list of tested hardware and one of the items, was the Arduino Nano BLE Sense, which I had a stack of them. Once I knew I could build a model around the Arduino platform, I quickly established how I could use a variety of off the shelf parts to quickly make my Siren Monitor.

Overview Schematic

The finished feature list

Its probably best to watch the You Tube video on the project, but here is a list of features:

• Noise detection using Edge Impulse and their machine learning platform
• TFT display
• Touch screen
• SD Card for data storage
• Wi-Fi ready for date and time stamps of recorded events
• Event categorisation via TFT touch interface
• Webserver for displaying events
• SD card file operations
• Touch screen beep
• Arduino Nano heart beat to ESP32
• TFT back light sleep

If anyone wants to build this, or would like me to build them one, just message.