It's a common problem encountered by shade-tree mechanics. You can hear the noise inside the engine bay, but you can't figure out where it's coming from. That's where a sound camera comes in.
Sound cameras aren't anything new, but they've always been massive, unwieldy things that require assembly and are too big to hold. So Professor Seok-Hyung Bae from the Department of Industrial Design at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and one of his former students came up with a portable version.
"Abnormal noises coming from industrial products have relatively higher frequencies," Professor Bae says, so they've reduced the complexity of the sound camera to only target frequencies between 350 hZ to 12 kHz. That allowed it to be smaller, lighter and more portable, tipping the scales at just under four pounds.
The pentagon-shaped "camera" has five arrays of microphones – 30 in total – that are capable of capturing 25 sound "images" per second. In the middle of the 15-inch pentagon is an optical camera that sends images to a computer and overlays the sound patterns atop the picture. The result is a visualization of what sounds are coming from where, with a heat map similar to a thermal camera.
The device – memorably named the SeeSV-S205 – took home the Red Dot Design Award earlier this year for its ergonomics and portability, and sales are expected to begin this summer, just in time for you to start tinkering with that Austin-Healey collecting dust in your garage.
