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[on:]

Hi Everyone

I'm looking for advice on building or sourcing a sound sensor for use in a project i'm busy with.
I need to pick up the hooters/horns of cars at an intersection and keep track of the amount of times someone hoots/honks their
horn.

Right now my focus is on reliably picking up these 'noise events' with an arduino, I have little experience with using microphones trigger or sound sensors.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Reply #1 on:]

This sounds like a pretty sophisticated signal processing problem:   you can't just use sound level, because many things at an intersection make lots of noise (trucks, motorcycles).  You can't just use frequency discrimination, because vehicle horns are of many types.  The one thing somewhat different about a horn honk and other sounds at an intersection might be the sudden attack, i.e., the rapid sudden rise in noise level.  Detecting that accurately would probably be tricky, given all the background noise, but if it were combined with frequency discrimination, it might work.

All that being said, though, I don't think you're going to talk a little Arduino into that kind of processing load.

[Reply #2 on:]

Thanks for the response.
I imagined it would be a fairly complex procedure.
But that aside i'm just curious how you would begin to approach something like that.
Could it be microcontroller based, or would you need
a full computer setup to handle the processing in addition to high end sound equipment?

Would it be possible to touch on this sort of thing with processing and a microphone?