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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.
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.
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.
The product is clearly a knockoff