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Using Your Computer to Repel Pests

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.

circletimessquare writes "A Thai guy wrote a program that uses your computer speaker to repel mosquitoes, cockroaches, and rats! Just when you thought you heard it all before (pun intended for no good reason). " Thats nothing- CowboyNeal can repel all known lifeforms just by playing his massive collection of boy band MP3s.

6 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Re:TMI TMI TMI!!!!! by JabberWokky · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Y'know, it actually occurs to me that Pater (aka CowboyNeal) is actually a pretty damn cool guy to laugh with everybody else at the fun that gets poked at him.

    --
    Evan

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  2. Darwin's Revenge by Tablizer · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Such a trick may only work for so long. Eventually bugs and pests will evolve a tolerance to it. Being that bugs reproduce pretty quickly, it may only take a few years before it is ineffective I would guess.

    Then again, if there is nothing to eat there, and most bugs are just accidental interlopers, evolution may not do much.

    IOW, if you are a slob (like most slashdotters), then Darwin will win.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  3. Re:Does it work on pointy-headed bosses? by RCO · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The mosquito freq. works for the blood suckers. The rat freq. is self explanitory. The cockroach freg is for the ones that make your skin crawl.

    --
    'And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo Every day you meet quite a few...'
  4. Re:Engineering Question by sasami · · Score: 2, Insightful

    More to the point, you want the frequency-response curve of the speaker to be flat as possible throughout the range of human hearing. That means the dropoff at the end of the curve has to be outside the range of human hearing.

    --
    Dum de dum.

    --
    Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
  5. Dragonflies by f00Dave · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A friend of mine once proposed building a mechanical box that duplicated, in hardware, the two-winged thrum of a dragonfly. He spends a LOT of time outside, wandering about in the woods and in marshes and has come to the conclusion that as soon as a dragonfly appears, the mosquitoes seem to vanish.

    Now, it's either that he only noticed the 'fly after it ate all the little turds, or they're hardwired to flee the noise of it's wings.

    I'm wondering if that particular thrumming sound would be effective (since the high-pitched whine version would probably drive me nuts anyway: I can sense tones up to 21KHz or so ... TVs drive me up the wall).

    So, who's got a recording of dragonfly sounds they want to share(ware)? ;-)

    --
    .f00Dave
  6. Uh, hold on... by EdMcMan · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "This program produces sound in the range of 16000Hz to 20000Hz which is beyond the audible range of the humans."

    That is from the 'about box'. Last time I checked, the human hearing range was 20Hz to 20000Hz...