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I built a $15 edge-only acoustic drone warning system
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HN · launched Mar 21, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 1 view
Niche: rf and signal detection equipment · 19 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Security
- Hardware & robotics
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 19 launches in rf and signal detection equipment →
Could you build this?
No An acoustic drone detector on a $15 edge device requires physical microphone hardware, embedded digital signal processing, and a custom micro-ML classification model tuned to drone acoustic signatures.
What it would actually take: Built on microcontrollers like the ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico with an I2S MEMS microphone array running FreeRTOS. The critical engineering challenges are low-power edge digital signal processing (FFT, Mel-frequency spectrograms), training an audio classification neural network on sparse drone acoustic data, and quantizing it (via TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers or Edge Impulse) to fit micro-SRAM limits.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Radar drone detection systems, Camera array surveillance
Concerns raised: Whether it actually works in real-world conditions, Requires per-environment calibration for thresholds, Accuracy in noisy environments
Feature requests: ESP-NN / TensorFlow Lite Micro integration for better accuracy
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 848 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #600 of 849 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 136 days after the earliest competitor.
- DroneTector: high-resolution radars to detect small drones · yc · 2026-02-19 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Tenet - Low-cost, mass-produced strike drones · yc · 2026-05-29 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- I vibecoded a heavy lift drone · hn · 2026-08-11 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Kairox Systems: Drones that can fly and swim · yc · 2026-11-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Maquoketa Research: Guidance systems for one-way attack drones · yc · 2026-06-01 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- jev-drone · github · 2026-09-16 · 85 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Impact Drones: Air Defense as a Service for Civilian Infrastructure · yc · 2026-08-04 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- VolAnti · hn · 2026-09-09 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.55
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