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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.
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
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
I'm just thinking of all the dopeslap moments I'll have when sneaking home late at night and having the lights come on just AFTER I smack my head into a wall.
Sounds like good times.
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.
"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.
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."
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
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.
Indeterminate is right. I bought a clapper not long ago and connected it to several lamps. The stereo, TV, bumps, dropping things, etc. made the place like a strobe light. The concept is not such a bad idea but the activation should much better controlled to be practical.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
How about a secret knock detector?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Don't knock it till you tried it.
If you have more than one thing to control, you'll need some encoding scheme, like Morse code. This won't scale up well.