Background

The Designs are expected to revolve around the available PC sound cards which can act both as a means of outputting (D/A) a range of frequencies to the coils and a means of reading (A/D) the resulting signals. Current (2007) PC sound cards include A/Ds and D/As that are able to take 192,000 samples per second with a resolution of 24 bits. These first appeared about 2001 with a price of thousands of dollars but are already in 2007 available at under US$100 each.

The total parts cost of the interface circuitry and coils is expected to be less than US$10 yet with the addition of readily available computers and sound cards can create mine detectors that are as good or better than ones currently costing several thousand dollars.

It seems an obvious way to produce a design and I expect that that would be a very worthwhile addition in the fight to reduce death and injury from buried land mines. If it ends up helping to find just a small number of mines that wouldn't otherwise have been located then it will have been a worthwhile project.

It is hoped that this project can produce a range of designs starting with the simple embedded systems based on PC compatible circuit boards through to detectors that can use a Laptop or smaller handheld computers that allow some portability through to vehicle mounted designs that have a large number of coils and give the users a visual display of detected objects. It is hoped that much of the work involved in creating the earlier simpler detectors can then be used as modules to create later more advanced systems.

Design is here taken as meaning:

•  Design of all software needed plus
•  Documentation of the software including the module interfaces
•  Design of coils or other transducers plus
•  Design of interface circuitry for outputting (amplifying) the signals to the transducers plus
•  Design of circuitry to condition the resulting signals and send them to the inputs of the sound card.
•  Design of GPS Interface (GPS is probably an optional extra)
•  Design of instructions to create and use these mine detectors.

It is expected that the projects will involve a number of people in their designs. That should include

•  people that are good at the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) software
•  people good at software for final analysis and display of results.
•  people that are good at circuit board design and/or manufacture
•  a range of people who can support the design in other ways such as documentation, website design, project management, promotional activities etc.

It should be noted that the project proposal does not include the final manufacture of the detectors. The above circuit board design and manufacture as part of the project is only that needed in order to created a properly tested design.

The objective of the project is only to create the design for detectors. Once the Open Source design is created anyone will be able use it to manufacture detectors or as a basis for their own designs. This could be humanitarian organisations but it could also be commercial companies.