Steampunked Bat Detector

Hi everybody!

At the end of my last instructable I made this promise:

"At the end of this instructable I am proud to announce you a second object in this particular style. The steampunked bat-detector will coming soon". By the way this kit is already available in U.S. and UK.

Now it is time to honor my promise and I´d like to present the Steampunked Bat Detector made by Junophor. The kit itself from franzis is very easy to built up with only some parts to solder. This kit contains a very good bat detector manual with a lot of additional options so you will have a lot of fun with it.

It also explains very well how this kit is working so let me cite so

"In flight the animals emit ultrasonic
sounds that they use for navigation and to track down their prey. We cannot hear the calls of bats. A young person can perceive sounds up to a frequency of 20 kHz, with older age this threshold decreases, sometimes below 10 kHz. Bats call at frequencies far above 20 kHz, depending on species they may, for 4 instance, call at 40 kHz or still higher frequencies. The bat detector translates such high frequencies into deeper sounds that we are able to hear clearly. And that’s why you will hear the bats more often with this device than you will see them."

But the steampunked construction was a little bit more difficult to create and I try to show you the making of with a lot of details.

Before we start let me show you a short video how this bat detector works and of course it is meant "ultrasonic" not "supersonic" I am talking about ;-))

If you like to read the original steampunked diary (only in german language) you can find it here.

And now it is time to start and I hope you enjoy it!

This bat detector is meant to be a sort of twin to the lightning detector and so I took another old telephone from ebay made of black bakelite and I chose the same steampunk applications as you can see. But was is different now?

Well two brass horns of different sizes will carry the ultrasonic microphone (the smaller one) and the loudspeaker (the bigger one). This bigger horn runs into a big slice of red vulcanised fiber which is placed where the former dialer had been built in.

The vulcanised fiber had been glued together with some small plywood and in the center a hole was drilled with a 25 mm forstner drill. A ring of brass screws was placed around to tighten the slice with the telephone hood. Next step was to drill all holes in front for the two Knobs and aside for the switches and the copper tubes. Next some special gears made of steel had been screwed around the loudspeaker-horn. At the end the bigger brass horn was fixed with resin at the telephone hood.

An antique bulb horn had been desoldered and turned into a new form like the letter "S". To place the chosen loudspeaker in it I had to work out a special ring with the lathe. To protect the loudspeaker I added a grid made of small copper wire. This had been glued together with the new fiber ring by taking bondic UV active resin. This construction was finally fixed with a double-sided tape in the horn. The horn now intensifies the sound of loudspeaker.

The smaller horn, also an antique bulb hooter, was treated in the same way with desoldering, new forming and soldering together again. To fix the ultrasonic microphone I used a piece of cork from a champagne-bottle. Cork is said to be an acoustical "soft" material which deadens acoustic noise. So no back coupling from the loudspeaker will disturb the detection. This also the reason for fixing the small horn at the bottom made of plywood and vulcanised fiber.

The bottom is made of plywood glued together with black vulcanised fibre. It carries the battery box, the small horn and the pcb.

Bats are flying around at the dawn and at night. So if you stay outside the house to listen to them, you need some light and that is why two amber coloured LED had been added into brass grommets; the two copper tubes protect the switches and are useful to carry the detector outside.

After finishing the steps before, this project comes slowly to its end. Just one hour later all electronic parts like switches and LED had been connected with wires to the pcb.

I developed the genius idea of the invertor Mr. B. Kainka furthermore to fix the pcb with bare wire as you can see. Now the pcb is fixed to insulating screw joints and with this trick it is possible to place the pcb nearly at every place -even stacked if neccessary- inside a new (steampunked) case.

And now the steampunked bat detector is ready for work. Besides listening to the bats a lot of other animals like grasshoppers communicate with ultrasonic sounds and also a lot of technical things, e.g. current transformers mobiles, laptops, cars and so on but also metal things clinging together like keys and spoons sending out ultrasonic frequencies. It is very funny to find out what is all around.

Hope you enjoyed this very detailed presentation a little bit and maybe you will try it by yourself with this kit.

Yours Aeon Junophor