Category Archives: ultrasound

72 Tranducers For Acoustic Levitation

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Levitation has a way of arousing curiousity and wonder wherever it appears. There’s a multitude of ways to do it, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and ideal use cases. [Julius Kramer] tried his hand at acoustic levitation, and decided to share his build.

The build relies on an astounding number of ultrasonic transducers – 72, in fact. The device operates at 40 kHz to be well above the human range of hearing. 36 each are placed in the top and bottom shells of the device’s 3D printed chassis. Through careful construction, the transducers are placed an integer multiple …read more

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Can ‘sonar’ sniff out your Android’s lock code?

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Researchers have demonstrated a novel, if slightly James Bond technique, for clandestinely discovering the unlock pattern used to secure an Android smartphone. Continue reading Can ‘sonar’ sniff out your Android’s lock code?→

Using Acoustic Levitation for Applications Going Way Beyond Novelty

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We’ve all seen acoustic levitation, it’s one of the scientific novelties of our age and a regular on the circuit of really impressive physical demonstrations of science to the public. The sight of arrays of ultrasonic speakers causing small objects and beads of liquid to float in mid-air without any suspension is magical, captivating people of all ages. Thus a lecture at Hackaday Belgrade on the subject from Asier Marzo, a research scientist with a speciality in the field of ultrasonics at the UK’s University of Bristol, was a particularly fascinating and informative one.

He started by explaining acoustic levitation …read more

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An Ultrasound Driver With Open Source FPGAs

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Ultrasound imaging has been around for decades, but Open Source ultrasound has not. While there are a ton of projects out there attempting to create open ultrasound devices, most of this is concentrated on the image-processing side of things, and not the exceptionally difficult problem of pinging a sensor at millions of times a second, listening for the echo, and running that through a very high speed ADC.

For his entry into the Hackaday Prize, [kelu124] is doing just that. He’s building an ultrasound board that’s built around Open Hardware, a fancy Open Source FPGA, and a lot of very …read more

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Fail of the Week: The Little Ultrasonic Knife That Couldn’t

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We all know the feeling of an idea that sounded great when it was rattling around in our head, only to disappoint when we actually build the thing. It’s a natural consequence of trying new stuff, and when it happens, we salvage what we can and move on, hopefully in wisdom.

The thing that at least semi-defeated [This Old Tony] was an attempt to build an ultrasonic cutter, and it didn’t go well. Not that any blood was shed in the video below, although there seemed like there would be the way [Old Tony] was handling those X-Acto blades. His …read more

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Turn Medical Imaging From 2D Into 3D With Just $10

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One of the modern marvels in our medical toolkit is ultrasound imaging. One of its drawbacks, however, is that it displays 2D images. How expensive do you think it would be to retrofit an ultrasound machine to produce 3D images? Try a $10 chip and pennies worth of plastic.

While — of all things — playing the Wii with his son, [Joshua Broder, M.D], an emergency physician and associate professor of surgery at [Duke Health], realized he could port the Wii’s gyroscopic sensor to ultrasound technology. He did just that with the help of [Matt Morgan, Carl Herickhoff and Jeremy …read more

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Best Product Entry: A HSDK for Ultrasound Imaging

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As an entry into this year’s Best Product portion of the Hackaday Prize, [kelu124] is developing a hardware and software development kit for ultrasound imaging.

Ultrasound is one of the primary tools used in modern diagnostic medicine. Head to the doctor with abdominal pain, and you can bet you’ll be seeing the business end of an ultrasound system. While Ultrasound systems have gotten cheaper, they aren’t something everyone has in the home yet.  [kelu124] is working to change that by building a hardware and software development kit which can be used to explore ultrasound systems. This isn’t [kleu124’s] first rodeo. …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry : DEER — An Electronic Repellent

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Ultrasonic repellent devices used to keep away insects, rodents, birds, and even large animals have been around for quite a while, but their effectiveness depends on who you ask.  Some critters just don’t seem affected, while some others definitely will avoid being around such a device. Deploying a few of these devices to scare off animals seems to be working quite well for [Ondřej Petrlík]. Around where he lives, the fields of tall grass need to be mowed down during the spring. Unfortunately, the tall grass is ideal for young, newborn animals to stay hidden and safe. The mowing machines …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Heart Failure Detection Device

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Early and low-cost detection of a Heart Failure is the proposal of [Jean Pierre Le Rouzic] for his entry for the 2017 Hackaday Prize. His device is based on a low-cost Doppler device, like those fetal Doppler devices used to listen an unborn baby hearth, feeding a machine learning algorithm that could differentiate between a healthy and an unhealthy hearth.

The theory behind it is that a regular, healthy hearth tissue has a different acoustic impedance than degenerated tissue. Based on the acoustic impedance, the device would classify the tissue as: normal, degenerated, granulated or fibrous. Each category indicates specific …read more

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