Poor man’s chassis ear

[Kuku]

While trying to figure out where does my “clunks” are coming from, I’ve used a some really cheap microphones, cords and USB sound devices off ebay that turned out to work really well, (see the attached image)

My shopping list was –
1$ USB Sound device
1$ Microphone (even comes with clip so it’s easy to hook to suspension parts)
1$ 3meters cord so you wind your wire all the way to the notebook in the cabin
Multiple that by the amount of USB ports you have and there you go – my version of a chassis ear

I’ve hooked up my mics to the left side hub, right side hub and right side top strut (I only have 3 USB ports for the matter)
Just by looking at the sound waves you immediately know that the clunks are coming from the right side hub area, further investigation (I hooked them to the upper and lower control arms and shoved one mic into a hole in the hub) turned out to be a bad wheel bearing after carefully listening to each channel….

Good luck!

Attachments:

• box28.jpg
• sound.jpg
• mic.jpg

Topic

[Bryan]

Awesome. I joined just to be able to comment on this.

I ordered four of each.

Curious: what program did you use? Is that a Mac screen or a Windows screen?

[Kuku]

I’m glad you found it useful, the software is called “Audacity”, You can find it here : http://audacityteam.org/

[Steve]

I also thought this was awesome. I’ve purchased 4 usb sound devices and the mics and tried to set it up but audacity appears to only want to receive input from 1 device at a time. I can’t see a way to associate a device with a track to achieve what you have done. My searches on audacity suggest it needs more hardware. Any more tips?

[Kuku]

I did not use Audacity to record, Since I’m using Linux this is the command line I ran to record all three channels to different files :

#/bin/bash
gst-launch-1.0 -v alsasrc device=hw:1,0 ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=/tmp/frontdiff.ogg &
gst-launch-1.0 -v alsasrc device=hw:2,0 ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=/tmp/transfer.ogg &
gst-launch-1.0 -v alsasrc device=hw:3,0 ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=/tmp/reardiff.ogg

[Author]

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