Windshield Wipers

10 Hours of Driving in Rain for Sleeping
RelaxingASMR
It's been raining sporadically. It pours for a minute and then it stops. A few minutes, or miles, later and it starts drizzling and then it stops, or pours, or dribbles so I'm constantly turning the wipers on or off or speeding them up or slowing them down and I'm thinking there's got to be a better way. Maybe if I siliconized my windshield and got some of them RainX wipers with the silicon edge I could just leave them on all the time and because if they've got all the silicon, they wouldn't squeak even when it was dry. That would be an improvement, if it worked, but it wouldn't be a big improvement, and it would require siliconizing the windshield which would require a bunch of elbow grease to get it properly rubbed in.

Vaisala WXT531 Acoustic Rain Gauge

No, what we need is a robot that can tell when the wipers need to be activated and does it automatically. I was thinking you'd need a camera and some kind of image processing software to tell when the view is obscured, but then I remembered a solid state rain gauge. It was basically a small, light weight metal dome connected to a microphone. Whenever a raindrop hit the dome, the microphone would hear it, and the computer that was listening to its signal would add one to the number of raindrops. We might be able to use a similar technique to control the wipers. Stick a microphone (technically a sound transducer) to the windshield and listen for raindrops and squeaky windshield wipers. Shouldn't be that hard, right?