Low power sound level meter with octave filtering

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J

Jabbaz

Member
Joined 2004
#1
I've built the following Hackaday project as a starting point, using an ESP32 and MEMS mic:

ESP32-I2S-SLM | Hackaday.io

Next I'd like to augment it by implementing a 1/3 octave filter so that I can calculate a Leq in each band in real time, also exponential time weighting and stats calcs. I haven't tried yet but I'm concerned the processing will be too intense for the hardware and it won't keep up.

My project priorities in order are:
  • Low power (ideally <1W)
  • Ease of development (Arduino-like is nice)

I'm a bit green with MCU/MPUs but I understand ESP32 is general purpose whereas there are DSP optimized devices which can more efficiently perform this type of processing.

Questions:

  • Should I try doing this on ESP32 or is it a waste of time?
  • Is there a platform I should consider replacing the ESP32 with, or a processor I should think about partnering with it to do the DSP heavy lifting?
 
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#2
Some people might consider it a waste of time, at least from a practical perspective. There are sound level meter and spectrum analyzer apps for cell phones now that can work reasonably well for some purposes. Lots of people have those already.
 
#3
Markw4 said:
Some people might consider it a waste of time, at least from a practical perspective. There are sound level meter and spectrum analyzer apps for cell phones now that can work reasonably well for some purposes. Lots of people have those already.
Click to expand...

Thanks, yes I did look a fair bit at already available apps. I'm looking to create something that's more of a headless IoT device and something where I can have some control over quality (I have various standards I want to meet e.g. ANSI/ASA S1.11-2004, IEC 61672)
 
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