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.