AirSonar¶

At the Underwater Acoustics Conference & Exhibition 2025 we introduced a design for an airborne sonar. This uses a tweeter as a transmitter and arrays of MEMS microphones to record the echo. To see the initial results, you can read the paper from the conference.

The hardware designs, firmware and processing code for this project are in the process of being released as open-source projects for anybody who wishes to build their own. The following sections link to the sources that are currently available.

PCBs¶

Repository: https://github.com/airsonar/pcbs

Documentation: https://airsonar-pcbs.readthedocs.io/

Designs for the custom PCBs used for our implementation. Licensed under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Weakly Reciprocal license (SPDX code CERN-OHL-W-2.0). Designed in KiCad. The documentation include design notes and usage details for each PCB.

Processing¶

Repository: https://github.com/airsonar/processing

Documentation: https://airsonar-processing.readthedocs.io/

Python modules to process data collected from the airborne sonar. This is at an early stage; we are in the process of reorganising, documenting and creating unit tests for the code used in the paper. In the near future this will be published on PyPI and notebooks will be added demonstrating how to recreate the figures in the paper. Available under the BSD 2-Clause Plus Patent license (SPDX code BSD-2-Clause-Patent.