2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Industrial manufacturing processes depend heavily upon both the condition of the machine and the health of tools. Failure of tools can affect both plant downtime and quality of the products. Monitoring these conditions and diagnosing faults are an important component of preventative maintenance systems which decrease maintenance costs, improve quality of the product and increase the longevity of the machine. Additionally, monitoring tool conditions such as wear and failure are an important part of manufacturing. A solution is to use non-invasive sensors such as acoustic microphones to remotely detect manufacturing process parameters. Acoustic signals produced by these machines can be used to monitor spindle speed, depth of cut, and feed rate to ensure optimal performance.

Off-the-shelf data acquisition systems exist for acquiring multiple simultaneous analog input channels. One such PC-based system is the National Instruments PXI platform. These systems can be programmed using LabVIEW, C/C++, or Python. However, these systems can be very expensive. Thus, there is a need for low-cost data acquisition systems with similar essential capabilities. The goal of this paper is to show the design of a hardware/software system with fractional cost compared to a commercial system for collecting and displaying acoustic signals from a spherical microphone array consisting of 32 microphones. The signals from all microphones will be collected simultaneously, achieving a sample rate of at least 48 kHz and at least 10-bits of resolution for each microphone. A Python GUI will be used to control the data collection process and display the data (both time and frequency domain) from each microphone. A detailed testing procedure with results will be shown to validate the system’s performance. An example of such a system was designed by students in a project-based course, suitable for senior-level students in electrical and computer engineering and engineering technology programs. This paper will show detailed engineering requirements, schematics, software flowchart, and testing results for this system.