Initial Setup - noise sensor and raspberry pi

 

 Over the past few weeks, I’ve been setting up my first prototype for my MSc research: a system that measures noise levels in real time.

The goal? To better understand how sound shapes our classrooms and eventually help improve awareness of noise in teaching spaces.

Here’s the little toolkit I’ve been working with:

🔹 Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB)

🔹 MCP3008 10-bit ADC

🔹 GY-MAX4466 microphone module

It’s a simple but powerful setup — the Pi captures noise levels and streams them into Node-RED and Python. These then form the backbone of what I’m calling a digital twin prototype (still exploring whether this is a “full” digital twin or an application of digital twin methodologies — a useful distinction raised by a colleague Linda Muriuki).

Of course, there have been a few bumps along the way:

1️⃣ I first tried using a Raspberry Pi Pico, but serial port conflicts between Thonny and VS Code (which I was using to stream into Tandem) proved tricky.

2️⃣ Contrary to what many tutorials suggested, copying the Raspberry Pi Imager file directly onto the SD card didn’t work — I had to fully write the OS instead.

3️⃣ And, as always, wiring the noise module correctly took longer than expected.

🔜 Next steps:

1. Finalising the setup so it’s reliable across multiple rooms

2. Finding a visualisation interface that works for this context (Bentley Systems Itwin and Autodesk Tandem lean more toward facility management than interactive engagement)

I’d love to hear from others:

If you’ve worked with low-cost IoT sensors or acoustic monitoring, what lessons or pitfalls did you encounter when scaling up from prototype to deployment?