EchoMatic™ Project History:

I am a former JPL/NASA engineer, now free lance inventor working on an ultrasonic device for visually impaired people. I really have compassion for people who can't see. I'm a very visual person, so the thought of always bumping into things and being shut in a room, as many blind people are, really offends me.

I live in an apartment complex and I have a blind neighbor who has to get to work at a radio station. We live on a busy highway. One day I saw him walking his dog along the apron of the highway inches from death. It really affected me that he had no way of knowing where he was and that people would just whoosh by him not caring. I was almost struck by a truck on the same road while I was riding my bicycle home late one night. An old pickup had this wide rear view mirror. I wasn't wearing my reflectors that night. That truck mirror missed me by less than a foot at better than 50 miles an hour. Talk about getting it up side of the head. I didn't ride for months after that.

So long story short

My invention – the EchoMatic™ - will be worn like a Walkman and transmits sounds to the environment to create an audio image of one's surroundings. This invention will eventually work underwater to enable communication with dolphins. A cool thing about my invention is that if two people are wearing them, they can communication ultrasonically without being heard by anyone else, or intercepted on cellphones or other radio based devices, but that is another story and another market.

Brief Technical History and Influences

No one designs or invents in a vacuum. As a somewhat precocious reader of electronics and science books I was influenced from childhood by the work of John C. Lilly, a CalTech graduate and University of Pennsylvania M.D. who wrote the book, "Man and Dolphin". Lilly performed groundbreaking (waterbreaking?) research in sensory deprivation in isolation tanks. Popular television programs like "Sea Hunt" and "Flipper" strengthened this curiousity. At twelve I was deeply affected by the musicianship of Jimi Hendrix, who used a frequency multiplier called the "Octavia" designed by Roger Mayer to produce absolutely amazing sounds.

Years later. I saw a special on freestyle bicyclists who were blind. They were using tongue click echo location to navigate around urban obstacles. As an engineer I knew immediately that we could improve on tongue clicking. I spent some time sampling various sounds and measuring the frequencies of tongue clicks. I investigated bat sonar, dolphins and whales and the speed of sound and so forth. This was a continuation of work I had done at the University of Missouri where I had proposed using the phenomenon of ultrasonic atomization of fuel for an automobile carburator.

Frequency Multiplication or octave shifting turns out to be a very interesting problem. Recall from music that each octave represents a doubling of the frequencies in an even tempered scale, or in any scale for that matter. So an "A" at 440 Hz has its first sibling A to the right on the piano at 880 Hz and so forth. A pure A is hard to find and most A's consist of harmonic content at various octaves along with undertones and overtones that are properties of the instrument.

To perform frequency multiplication using analog components one can use squaring circuits which look a lot like power supply rectifier networks. The problem is that using squaring circuits to double frequency distorts the waveform. The negative peaks are pointed and the harmonic content is affected.

In August of 2000 I ordered a pair of bat detector circuits that purported to be activated in the 32 kHz regions. These devices proved unsatisfactory. About this time a friend then suggested that I use voltage to frequency converters. By September of 2000 experimentation with these had not yielded useful results. As a software engineer with numerical analysis training it appeared that what I really wanted was to do a Fourier transform on the incoming waveforms to determine the distribution of their harmonic content, and then octave multiply that content in the frequency domain.

By late December of 2000 I had spoken to a number of leaders in the digital signal processing industry and was looking at a DSP product from Analog Devices called the EZ-Shark. I attended a short course on this product.

In late November I had also started looking at the DSP product line from Texas Instruments and attended a short course just before 11/25/2002 on a DSP evaluation kit called the C6711. It featured floating point processing, programmability in 'C' and appeared to be a good starting point for the project. By December I was making progress but had run into problems with the codec on the C6711 - it did not work in the frequency ranges needed.

The frequency shift algorithms using the C6711 DSK from Texas instruments were working fine, but the AD535 codec on the C6711 DSK quit functioning at 4 kilohertz. I acquired an add-on daughter board with low resolution D to A converters, but a software interface to this board did not exist. When I plugged the daughter board into the C6711 DSK it got extremely hot so I discontinued using the daughter board and wrote several appeals to TI for help.

The consequence of these appeals was that I was asked to be a beta tester for Code Composer Studio, the software development toolkit for the DSP product line. This was both an honor and a distraction. If it could enable a Board Support Library and Chip Support Library for the daughter board I would totally be in business. It didn't and I was hamstrung waiting for the interface libraries. So I waited for progress in the codec technology to appear. I posted a description of the project my web site in the hope that someone would see it and help me. Instead people would ask me for information on the TI DSP products. I referred these contacts to TI as both the people and the web site are excellent.

Finally a Colombian graduate student, Javier Villegas wrote me a letter asking for help with TI DSP. On 2/26/2002 I replied explaining the scoop from both the technical and human points of view. I referred him to TI since as they are quite strong on the training side. I was very direct and blunt in my letter and did not pull any punches, having felt all but forsaken by those with greater missions and wondering if this project would ever get off the ground.

Then exactly one month later to the day I received a message from an enthusiastic sales engineer at Texas Instruments whose name is Giselle Whitworth. Giselle has managed to garner sufficient support within TI to reactivate the project, especially addressing the codec issue through audio DSP engineer Joey Grasty.

I am traveling to Dallas tomorrow 3/16/2002 to attend a data converter seminar and to learn more about their progress in this area.

Financials

Once upon a time my funds were intact, but they have bled down to dangerously low levels even though so, I need a VC boost and 5 months to finish this project.

Marketing

The inventor of the antistuttering unit at Janus Development has offered me a marketing channel once I get the project finished.

That is my GAP full disclosure as of 3/15/2002. I can provide documentation of these claims where indicated.