Lithuanian startup launches open-source network to detect Shahed-type drones

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2965205/lithuanian-startup-launches-open-source-network-to-detect-shahed-type-drones

by giuliomagnifico • 1 month ago

128 72 1 month ago

lrt.lt

tristanj3• 1 month ago

[flagged]

Avicebron• 1 month ago

As much as I like to point and guffaw at "bad evil rocket man" the from orbit bit is doing a massive amount of lift (pun not intended) for that price.

Aboutplants• 1 month ago

Multi billion dollar spend to “see” $2,000 aircraft and try to shoot it down with multi million dollar equipment. The speed to produce and cost effectiveness of these drones are seemingly at a massive advantage right now vs Defense capabilities and straight up cost and looks to be that way for a good while.

dzhiurgis4• 1 month ago

Apples != oranges

zer00eyz2• 1 month ago

Defense capabilities and straight up cost and looks to be that way for a good while.

You are correct, that today, we (USA) lack the capability to defend against this threat in a meaningful way.

Multi billion dollar spend to “see” $2,000 aircraft

Look at how we deploy SOCOM assets today: smaller teams in the field far from fixed detection, a satellite to do this job, allows it to be tasked rather than having to deploy more, fixed detection equipment.

As part of a larger system it would be integrated by software: see the "Lattice" project from Anduril.

and try to shoot it down with multi million dollar equipment.

DAWG, (Defense Autonomous Warfare Group ) has requested a billion dollar base budget and 54 billion of flexible spending (More than the USMC per year) for 2027.

There is also the "Replicator" program (I think headed for phase two) to get unit costs back down, and volume up. Facets of this are bleeding into other spend. Andurill openly talks about unit costs, and how few tools are needed to put together their low cost missiles (still more expensive than drones but... headed in the right direction).

As for the astronomical size of that budget: it's cheap to build an idea, what is hard is testing. The Ukrainians have a massive advantage here, in that they ship these things to the front line. It's much cheaper to trial things when you don't have to buy something to blow up, repeatedly.

The US military has been falling behind for 25 years now (especially the navy: if you want to understand why it has become schrodinger's straight read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 ) and I think what is going on in Ukraine has been eye opening for them.

tristanj3• 1 month ago

The program will track every aircraft flying on earth simultaneously. The level of scope is not comparable.

tpolm2• 1 month ago

I wonder how this system can be protected from spam - if anyone can send data there, enemy can, too

embedding-shape2• 1 month ago

I feel like if/once they reach the number of expected participants (10k), it'd be easy to filter out the spam as long as the majority are truthful.

tpolm2• 1 month ago

So what prevents enemy from creating 20knparticipants constantly sending fake data?

tristanj3• 1 month ago

Shahed drones have increased in altitude from ~500m at the beginning of the Ukraine war to 2000-3000m, which is a 4x reduction in noise on the ground. The higher the drones are, the less noise they make at ground level, and the less effective this ground-based microphone system will be. The drones have moved to elevations to make them more difficult to target with ground based weapons. Reductions in ground noise are a secondary effect.

The latest versions of Shahed can reach 5000m in altitude, which would largely be inaudible on the ground.

anovikov2• 1 month ago

It's not about "can reach", it's fairly easy to get them to fly even higher. It's about danger of interceptors vs danger of detection. Today's Ukrainian detection network (based on radars) is so dense there is no way to hide from it anywhere, anyway, so high altitude wins.

Hackbraten• 1 month ago

It's about danger of interceptors vs danger of detection.

What's with that "vs" trade-off?

You're saying avoiding detection requires high altitudes.

What do interceptors have to do with that?

warumdarum2• 1 month ago

So film the sky during charging and run a llm on it?

Neywiny• 1 month ago

Or an image detection model. Fraction of the compute and can run even on edge embedded. And easy to train with your own data

dghlsakjg5• 1 month ago

Clouds and nighttime are a barrier to visual detection. Even with good effectiveness the conditions needed for that would mean that you have far less than 50% uptime, and your downtime is predictable to your adversary.

A cheap radar takes an order of magnitude less power to run on hardware that is cheaper than an LLM and can see way farther than a camera.

LtWorf2• 1 month ago

Language models are terrible at computer vision. I don't know why you think that a software to generate words would be able to see flying objects in a picture.

dghlsakjg5• 1 month ago

At those higher altitudes they are trivial for radar to detect, and from farther away too. They are adapting cheap commodity used marine radars to get this done in some places

I suspect the Shaheds are going higher to mitigate AA ground fire. Higher up you have to send a missile or interceptor up.

It’s a trade off.

rdtsc3• 1 month ago

And interceptors are more expensive than Shaheds. A $100k interceptor (guessing here) to shoot a $10k Shahed can be an acceptable deal for the side launching the Shaheds.

ivandenysov• 1 month ago

Ukrainian P1-Sun interceptor FPVs were built specifically for this purpose. They are way cheaper than a Shaheed drone and have a practical ceiling of 5000+ meters according to wikipedia.

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/P1-Sun

inglor_cz• 1 month ago

Could you simply use small cheap balloons with microphones to listen in higher altitudes? Or even small drones that carry the microphones with their own engine noise masked out?

Edit: as others say, plain radar will suffice.

gnerd00• 1 month ago

~500m .. to 2000-3000m, which is a 4x reduction in noise on the ground.

Radiative power drops by the square of the distance? Does anyone with a real physics background start demanding authority on a soapbox like this?

reboot81• 1 month ago

Wouldn’t a purpose built Esp32 with microphones aimed at the sky do a better job? It would be always on, better directional targeting.

rdtsc3• 1 month ago

I believe Ukrainians had already deployed such a system. This is specifically designed to use old Android phones already sitting in a drawer somewhere without any other use, and most importantly by anyone without technical skills.

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

If these Shahed drones have a propeller they should have a brutal signature between 0-250Hz as they are moving a lot of air. And if the engine speed of the Shahed stays constant it will be even easier to detect it ("Angry lawnmower sound".. but that's only the high frequency part of it).

There are extremely sensitive differential pressure sensors (like SDP600-25Pa) available from Sensirion that aren't overly expensive.

Use one differential side and connect it to a kitchen funnel for directional listening the other one to a plastic bottle with a tiny hole in it. This way the sensor will "Null" out the environmental pressure (which the bottle follows very very slowly) from both inputs. It then only will pick up everything high frequency which is left over (and the bottle cannot follow because of its small hole).

This way I was able to detect washing machines that have a physical link to a house from many hundred meters (machine spinning -> house wall shaking -> pressure waves) away. The speed pattern of washing machines when spinning is very unique (several steps over many seconds).

Add this with some GPS PPS frame timestamping and you should have a nice tracking network that doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. But maybe the setup must switch to analog differential pressure sensors as these Senirion-I2C sensors do not have a Sync ping for super precise timestamping.

stavros• 1 month ago

Isn't detecting pressure waves in air exactly what microphones do?

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

Yes. But they usually are not performing very good between 1-250Hz.

Sensirion is using a thermal flow-sensing principle method which is basically a heated plate that cools/heats up when air passes it - making it extremely sensitive in this range.

Hnrobert42• 1 month ago

Interesting! There are a lot of super loud cars in my urban area. I want to catalog where and when they drive, so I can stand on the side of the street and shake my cane at them.

brookst• 1 month ago

I’ve always dreamt of building a mesh network of loud vehicle detectors that would map current loud noises and track where loud vehicles live, coupled with very powerful parametric speakers. So when e.g. the network detects a loud motorcycle at 3am anywhere in town, that live sound is instantly played at high volumes targeting only homes where other loud vehicles live.

Somehow there has been little VC interest in this idea.

warumdarum2• 1 month ago

https://freesound.org/people/PicassoCT/sounds/850225/

Curmudgeon Ai?

ejanus• 1 month ago

Interesting! I will like to see your circuits, if any.

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

Not much circuits needed.

The SDP600-25Pa speaks I2C and only has a handful of commands.

Just read it out with a microcontroller you love (like ESP32) and send the samples to a host for analysis. The ESP32 has limited I2C time stretching capabilities limiting it in the highest resolution modes of the sensor - but often that's not a big factor.

To not overwhelm the poor processor and Wifi maybe better a bunch of frames (like 512 or more).

customguy• 1 month ago

Use one differential side and connect it to a kitchen funnel for directional listening the other one to a plastic bottle with a very very small hole in it. It will pick up everything high frequency that's different to the environmental pressure.

Nevermind drones, and war, that's all fine; but I need to know more about this. Is there a phrase or name for this I could use to find more information, maybe example schematics?

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

The Sensirion SDP600-25Pa speaks I2C and only has a handful of primitive commands. Add this and 3.3V and you are done.

I'm 99.5% sure if you throw Claude with a datasheet on it will Slop out working code for a ESP32 with ESP-IDF.

ShinyLeftPad2• 1 month ago

Doesn't wind fool this?

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

Theoretically wind can be Nulled with a 4-way water splitter that are placed in 90° angles (+ a connector at the bottom to the sensor). As long they are orthogonal the wind pressure coming from one side will cause a negative pressure on the opposite.

Only pressure waves coming into all holes at the same time will reach sensor.

Never tested it. Only a Gedankenexperiment as Einstein would say.

amluto4• 1 month ago

What’s the frequency response of that sensor? The datasheet says nothing.

MiracleRabbit7• 1 month ago

Honestly: don't know.

My experiments never had a dependency on linearity.

dzhiurgis4• 1 month ago

Nice. And instead of smartphones, dedicated sensor using esp32 makes more sense imo.

custardguy• 1 month ago

The equivalent noise density of the sdp600 is 10^-2 Pa/sqrt(Hz). While the noise density of a typical microphone is 10^-6 Pa/sqrt(Hz). At same 50hz low frequencies. So either you're full of shit and a high quality microphone is x10000 more sensitive than this sdp600 sensor, or I'm not understanding what you're saying.

amluto4• 1 month ago

Any self-respecting microphone will be sensitive to tens of micropascals (the conversion between SPL and Pa is straightforward). The Sensirion device is proud of its ability to operate at 10 Pa.

That being said, most microphones are intended for audio and their amplifiers and readout circuitry are not optimized for very low frequencies. And the physical measurement devices don’t work down to DC. (If they did then the microphone wouldn’t work — the DC pressure is around 1 atm, which is some 12 orders of magnitude above the more quiet sounds the microphone is trying to detect.)

A device sold as a pressure sensor will be intended for use at or near 0 Hz and will work fine.

I assume the actual practical crossover is something like 0.1 - 10 Hz depending on the microphone. There’s an additional practical issue, though: the pressure sensor comes from the factory already calibrated for DC, whereas you may be on your own trying to get physical units out of a microphone much below 20Hz.

If you use a high end microphone intended for professional use with phantom power, you will also be fighting the power circuit and lower frequencies.

kamranjon2• 1 month ago

For those interested there is an open source radar based phased array project here: https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR

I may have even discovered it from hacker news, I forget now.

kklisura2• 1 month ago

I remember seeing this on HN when it was first submitted. I honestly think that project is either a scam, an elaborate hoax, a cover for a Chinese company selling radar systems or a three-letter-agency honeypot.

The files [1], [2], [3] on Github (once featured on README and on some articles) depict what I presume is a Chinese built radar which you can see here [4], [5]. I also suspect this might be a honeypot since Instagram - of all places - is full of accounts offering these radars [6], [7]. Some of the contributors on that projects are heavily leaning into AI. Git project history is suspicious. Discussions on the issues seem very artificial. I remember having bunch of notes on this project, but can't find it now. Just looking at it from outside, nothing about it seems real.

[1] https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR/blob/main/docs/a...

[2] https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR/blob/main/docs/a...

[3] https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR/blob/main/docs/a...

[4] https://www.cloudwalkerfpv.com/product/CW-t20.html

[5] https://www.militarysignaljammer.com/supplier-4701497-survei...

[6] https://www.instagram.com/cloudwalker_radar/

[7] https://www.instagram.com/radar_lisa88/

kamranjon2• 1 month ago

While you may be correct in some of these assumptions, the repo is open source, contains actual schematics and code, appears to have real community contributions, and also happens to exists now, which is something that can't be said for the original post this was a response to. I was hoping to just provide some reference to existing work that I found interesting since it is what I think is a much more traditional type of detection system.

dzhiurgis4• 1 month ago

AFAIK started by a fellow HN’er

k4rli• 1 month ago

Sounds like a simple app with mic input being sent to a yamnet-like audio classification model for a single target detection. Hardly anything innovative?

lnsru3• 1 month ago

Or it is a public stunt? I am naysayer engineer. Build acoustic detection system for anomaly detection in manufacturing line. It worked with studio level equipment with lots of noise filtering measures. First challenge was to have microphone listening to the right place and getting reliable signal. Second challenge was to amplify the right signal to a level where the features could be extracted. I doubt an old android with dirty microphone can detect anything reliably.

Lithuanian startup launches open-source network to detect Shahed-type drones

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