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Re:Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser by outworlder on Thursday April 21, 2016 @02:55PM (#11544485)
I thought that "beamforming" only applied to actively emitting signals, so that the waveforms would cancel/reinforce each other, to get the desired "direction". I have no idea how that works for microphones. Google is not very helpful, I get lots of hits for products.
Re:Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser by akiselev on Thursday April 21, 2016 @03:09PM (#11544583)
A much more intuitive name for beamforming is spatial filtering [1]. It just means using mutiple receivers along with knowledge about their location to filter out noise and other signals you don't want. The term also applies to emitters like phased radar arrays or MIMO cell towers which can use spatial filtering for beamforming but it's a general technique.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

Re:Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser by Relys on Thursday April 21, 2016 @03:21PM (#11544693)
Thanks, I've always seen a Beamforming option in my DD-WRT Router but didn't know the exactly technical implementation.
Re:Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser by outworlder on Thursday April 21, 2016 @03:12PM (#11544618)
Thank you!
Re:Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser by alexforencich on Thursday April 21, 2016 @04:45PM (#11545218)
It's a reciprocal process, meaning that it works for transmit as well as receive. In the receive direction, the antennas/microphones sample the incoming waves at various spatial points, and then the cancelling/reinforcing occurs when the received signals are phase shifted or delayed and summed.