HIGH RESOLUTION UNDERSEA ACOUSTIC DATA ACQUISITION USING SINGLE-BOARD MICROCONTROLLERS

There are a number of situations in the undersea environment in which it would be useful to have a
low-cost, low-power, deployable, high resolution acoustic data acquisition system. Thanks to the rapid
technological advances within the mobile computing industry, there are now a number of small, lowcost,
single-board microcontrollers available that lend themselves to the tasks of data acquisition and
processing. In this paper, we show how a single-board microcontroller, along with a 24-bit analogueto-
digital converter chip, and some amplification and filtering circuitry can be combined with a PVDF
hydrophone to record and analyse high resolution acoustic data. We compare the performance of this
low-cost acoustic data acquisition system with a commercial alternative.