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Reinventing the Clapper With a Knock-Based Home Automation Controller
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from Hack a Day: "Clap On! Clap Off! was super awesome when The Clapper came out in the mid-eighties. Now [Mathieu Stephan] is trying to make the concept much more functional. He put together a controller that lets you knock on walls to control things around the house. It's called the Toktoktok project and uses small boxes to receive user input and control items like lamps and computers." As the project website points out, Stephan is keeping the project intentionally open.
Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Great idea! Well, great until you've a lady friend over and the bed scoots just a little too close to the wall.
It's not necessarily, or only about laziness, but aesthetics too. Also handy if you have a room with 3 entrances, but only one has a light switch, etc.
To be fair this is not targeted just at turning on and off lights. The article states that is can control any electronic device: computers, music players, cooking... anything. And the creator explicitly says it is unencumbered with patents so it is an idea any one can use to improve any existing technology.
Sounds like a win-win
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Aldous Huxley
Can I set this up with port knocking. So maybe every time I get a knock on 22, then 23, and eventually 80, in any particular order on my external IP, that my lights go on and off? That would be cool. Maybe rig it to the stereo system, too. 137/138 would control the volume. Fun times.
the clapper work for old tvs with out a remote like the one in the ad. With the ones with remotes killing the power like that just made it lose the channel map.
Now days trying to kill the power like that will just mess up the cable box.
"Once", "Twice", or "Thrice ... well done."
You walk a couple meters to use a lightswitch? How fucking lazy are you? Active people like me go down to the breaker in the basement to turn the lights on and off, and then jog two laps around the house for good measure.
Word to the wise: laziness is not doing something potentially beneficial because you prefer to just sit around doing nothing. There is no gain from flipping a light switch, and therefore it's not lazy to find more convenient ways of doing it. You might as well bitch about people being too lazy to use a crank starter for their car.
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My kitchen is like that, whoever wired it 75 years ago should have known better.
I don't think my neighbors in my apartment complex would like me banging on random walls to turn things on and off. Like wise I would get pretty mad if i heard someone just banging on the wall throughout the day.
has a tail like a broomstick and she is a very happy girl. Crap would be flashing on and off all over the house.
I know reading the article is too much work for you, but the very first illustration shows someone leaving the room and knocking on the wall where a light switch would normally be found...
My grandfather had an old Zenith TV set with an ultrasonic remote. Every time someone jingled their keys or flushed the toilet, it would change the channel or adjust the volume. This seems like it will have the same problem.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You have 75 year old wiring? And the place hasn't burnt down yet? Or do your lights flicker every time your freezer compressor comes on?
Don't most (if not all) music players with any kind of speaker system already come with remotes? This whole thing really sounds to me like a solution looking for a problem.
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This whole thing really sounds to me like a solution looking for a problem.
That is the essence of the clapper: it is totally unnecessary. No one needs it; no one needs most of the things we discuss on Slashdot. But there are still people who want to discuss them just like there are people who want the clapper.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
I immediately thought of "The Fonz" from Happy Days when I saw this story. Now we can all be cool.
The product is clearly a knockoff
How long before we take this unit and have it turn on a mp3 player of a large dog barking viciously...
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75 year old wiring tends to be pretty good. Back then they were doing K&T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_and_tube_wiring style. It looks scary as hell but it tends to be pretty safe - since your hot and neutral are separated by a considerable air gap and the wires are thermally insulated from the structure, an insulation failure (abrasion or overheating) usually doesn't burn the house down. It doesn't have modern safety features like a safety ground, but the actual wiring is fine.
The switch away from it has more to do with cost than safety. The guys installing it usually knew what they were doing and paid much better attention to detail than the average contractor dragging romex these days. It took a lot of time, but it was a reliable and safe system, and if it's installed, there's no reason to rip it out and replace it just because it's old.
We're even too lazy to figure out what a couple of meters is in our British Imperial system of units (adopted as US customary units by changing the spelling of 'metres').
Have gnu, will travel.
Also handy if you have a room with 3 entrances, but only one has a light switch, etc.
Motion detector?
That clapper is going to make sneaking into the house late at night without waking the wife really tough.
Have gnu, will travel.
... can just shut off your loud stereo themselves by knocking on their ceiling with a broomstick.
Have gnu, will travel.
So when my Asian friends come over and turn off my lights can I take them to court for infringement?
"Penny...Penny...Penny..."
You're speaking as though you don't have a mobile phone or a bunch of remote controls orbiting your couch.
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If you have more than one thing to control, you'll need some encoding scheme, like Morse code. This won't scale up well.
So when folks knock on my door, my living room lights turn off?
Belgians wire long corridors with switches at each end in series.
I could try and fix it, but I'm afraid to touch it for fear of what I might find.
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It's already noisy enough without everyone banging on the walls.
Several points about K&T:
1) Good luck with insurance on it. Certainly where I am, they won't insure you unless you promise you're re-wiring.
2) No ground wire? Seriously? I don't even know where to begin with this one!
3) The really early insulators consisted of tar and cotton. So let me get this straight - it's a good idea to use two accelerants in wooden buildings, where modern day loads could cause the wires to get hot.
That's real smart!
As for your comments about the installers "usually" knowing what they were doing? I wouldn't trust your average contractor to install cabling - there's a reason why electrical contractors have certification.
There's a reason why old wiring should be replaced. The older wiring just isn't designed for modern day loads. And no earth wire? Really?
It's been 30 years, and I still can't get "Clap on! Clap off! Clap-on-clap-off..." song out of my head. This is worse than Ch-ch-ch-Chia Obama.
Gently reply
There is no gain from flipping a light switch
But there is. A light switch is a passive element, it consumes no power on its own. Any remote controller including the one in TFA will expend power 24/7 doing nothing but wait for your commands.
Every time anyone knocks on the wall in my house the dog bolts to the front door, tail wagging madly with joy, thinking a visitor has arrived. Think Dug from Up!... Definitely not an option in my house.
I live in an apartment building constructed in the mid-1930s and it looks like most of the wiring dates from back then, too.
Apart from the kitchen, which was remodeled 10 years ago by the previous owner, all of the wiring consists of cloth-insulated individual conductors inside copper tubing. I had to replace a light switch last year and the insulation literally crumbled to dust wherever I wasn't extremely gentle with it.
Ground wires? Well, the oven and the washing machine have safety grounds. Everything else has had the ground plugs removed to fit in the old-style two-prong sockets, the only ones that will fit. Besides, only the kitchen has an actual safety ground anyway.
The way my apartment is wired up to the mains, I have a theoretical 3-phase 400V connection. I say "theoretical", because in actual fact, one phase supplies the entire apartment with 10A 230V and the remaining two phases supply the kitchen with 2x 16A 230V. My electrician friend just shook his head and mumbled "goddamn Copenhagen wiring" when he saw it.
I have drawn up a budget for replacing the old wiring, but it would involve tearing down the beautiful stucco ceilings and basically remodeling the entire apartment in one go.
If it ain't broken, don't fix it :-)
Eat the rich.
The commercial and jingle etched into the memories of all who were sentient in the 80's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgN5tUgjb8
The current apartment neighbors are a bunch of idiots that can't close a door, drawer or cabinet without slamming it. Now all I have to do is place a speaker near the wall and have it play some annoying sound back to the neighbors each time they slam a door.
I lived in this house several years ago. Built in 1918, thoroughly modern with gas and electric... it still had a gaslight fixture at the top of the stairs. It had additional wiring installed over the years, in fact my basement was a good museum of electrical wiring with about every kind there was. The K&T wiring was solid, much better than some 30 years younger.
Now, if you have a house built in the 1970s with aluminum wiring you'd damned well better have some great insurance. Those houses were firetraps. It had been installed and removed in the pictured house; some of the 1970s wiring was still there but none of it was hot.
Free Martian Whores!
2) No ground wire? Seriously? I don't even know where to begin with this one!
Grounded house wiring (pos, neg, ground) is fairly recent. Until a couple of decades ago it was rare to find it in homes. Before then it was almost always "hot" and ground.
Free Martian Whores!
I would have hoped in the 21st century, you could just say "lights on" or "lights off" to control a lamp, not thump on the wall like a caveman.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.