Developing portable acoustic arrays on a large-scale e-textile substrate

This research deals with the production of electronic textiles (e-textiles) demonstrators. Initially, the research dealt with the creation of 4×5 microphone array on a large area conformal textile substrate. Once the interface electronics were connected to the 4×5 microphone array, this system became an effective acoustic array. Here, a new acoustic eight microphone array design has been designed, fabricated and tested. Changes were made to improve microphone array performance, and to optimize the associated software for data capture and analysis. This new design was based on UC-Berkeley mote microcomputer technology. The mote-based system addresses the issue of scaling acoustic arrays, to allow for distributing microphones over large-areas, and to allow performance comparisons to be made with the original 4×5 microphone acoustic array.