What should be included in a circuit board to allow experimentation with ultrasonic signals?

[ilana8]

TL;DR Summary

What should be included in a circuit board to allow experimentation with ultrasonic signals?

I've been wanting to experiment with ultrasonic signals, to see what could be done at different frequencies, amplitudes, maybe combining several modules and trying to get coherent effects, that sort of thing. There are components available specifically for ultrasonic ranging at short range with no obstruction (for your robots, etc), but they don't allow much in the way of experimentation across frequencies, or for non-ranging applications. So I was thinking of developing a board that had a few different features and maybe I could open-source the design.

As I'm just in the design process, I'm wondering, if you had such a board, what kind of experiments would you run, or gadgets would you try to build?

 

[.Scott]

I would suggest a steerable array - at least 4x4.

 

[berkeman]

I would suggest a steerable array - at least 4x4.

Interesting. What applications do you have in mind for that?

 

[Tom.G]

Interesting. What applications do you have in mind for that?

Perhaps Learning? (a bunch of stuff!)

 

[.Scott]

Interesting. What applications do you have in mind for that?

As @Tom.G said, learning.
Simply getting it to work at all would be an achievement - involving a lot of planning and design.

Then measuring its performance would be another substantial task - involving the development and documentation of systematic and perhaps automated methods of collecting the performance data - and reporting it. I wouldn't be surprised if the design of the device changed just to allow performance data to be collected more routinely.

Those two tasks will give you a certain level of mastery with the device - a likely many ideas of follow-on projects.

 

[Rive]

- piezoelectric transducers: complete dual purpose circuitry for several channels
- AD & DA for all of them
- a DSP beefy enough to handle all that, with adequate reserves to supply development from 'hello world' to beam forming...

Well, that's what I would start with.