This repository contains all source code and hardware design files for the tRacket noise sensor.
Environmental noise, especially in urban settings, is a known public health concern:
The growing body of evidence indicates that exposure to excessive environmental noise does not only impact quality of life and cause hearing loss but also has other health impacts, such as cardiovascular effects, cognitive impacts, sleep disturbance and mental health effects.
The tRacket noise sensor continuous monitors ambient sound levels (in decibels, dBA) and sends these measurements to an online dashboard (also on GitHub). Our goal is to help local communities better understand the sound levels and extreme noise events that they experience day to day.
The project has been started and is maintained by volunteers from the CivicTech Toronto community.
We followed Privacy by Design principles in setting up the data collection.
- The sound meter devices are deployed on private properties in residential areas at different locations in the city. We are not publishing exact device locations.
- The devices do not record sound only sound levels in A-weighted decibel levels (dBA)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel).
- We calculate minimum and maximum sound levels at 5 minute intervals on the device and only broadcast these aggregate values (along wiht the device ID) to a database.
The noisemeter-device folder contains the device's source code, which is written in C++ and can be built using PlatformIO. Build instructions are available in the online documentation.
The source code is released under the GNU GPL v3 license.
The hardware folder contains design files and documentation for each iteration of the sensor hardware. The PCBs are designed using KiCAD.
The hardware design files are released under an open hardware license.
- Check out the Issues page to see current bugs and feature requests. Any contributions are welcome!
- Online documentation of the firmware is available here.
