80FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles (and Switch On Lights)

New submitter Mathieu Stephan writes "Hello everyone! Some people told me that my latest project might interest you. I'm not sure you publish this kind of projects, but here it goes. Basically, it is a small platform that recognizes whistles in order to switch on/off appliances. It will be obviously more useful for lighting applications: just walk in a room, whistle, and everything comes on. The project is open hardware, and all the details are published on my website." The linked video is worth watching for the hidden-camera footage alone: it would be hard to not keep playing with this sensor.

Comments

Multiple rooms

[Dan East]

Interesting idea, but I think there would be serious scalability problems. Imagine if this was in each room in your home, and the doors to the rooms were open. Whistling in one room would almost certainly trigger the lights in the adjacent rooms as well. You would run into similar issues trying to control multiple lights in the same room independently, unless you started getting into more complex whistle patterns then those shown in the video. In that case you would start to sound like a songbird, or maybe R2D2.

And finally two side notes...
Not for use in emergency situations while eating saltine crackers.
This method of controlling the lights would be extremely popular in the von Trapp house.

Re:Multiple rooms

[houghi]

You would run into similar issues trying to control multiple lights in the same room independently,

That can easily be solved. All you need is a switch to decide what light you want to trigger. You could place that switch near the door, so you can do it the moment you come in.

Re:Multiple rooms

[gnasher719]

Interesting idea, but I think there would be serious scalability problems. Imagine if this was in each room in your home, and the doors to the rooms were open. Whistling in one room would almost certainly trigger the lights in the adjacent rooms as well.

Typical slashdot combination of the Nirvana fallacy (a solution that isn't 100% perfect is not acceptable), and a totally defeatist attitutude to technical problems.

Re:Multiple rooms

[Custard Horse]

All you need is a switch to decide what light you want to trigger. You could place that switch near the door, so you can do it the moment you come in.

A ridiculous idea - it'll never catch on!

I remember seeing a whistle device...

[ls671]

I remember seeing a whistle device that you attach to your key ring. When you lose your keys, you whistle and your key ring beeps.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tobar-Keyfinder-Keyring-Whistle-Activated/dp/B000246JIQ

Re:fucken retards

[Concerned Onlooker]

See, that's why the bible is so hard to believe. There's just no way all those things happened one minute apart.

Kids These Days...

[lobiusmoop]

They've got so much cheap compact compute horsepower to play with, it's almost obscene. 2048-wide FFT? In my day you would be overjoyed with a simple time-domain autocorrelation pitch detector.

(Lawn, etc...)

Re:Kids These Days...

[jmv]

Actually, an FFT is often cheaper than autocorrelation because it's N*log(N) whereas auto-correlation is N^2. In any case, it's insanely cheap on today's machines.

Re:as popular as the clapper!

[Nutria]

Back in the 70s (when The Clapper first came out), we had a similar contraption that was basically a plastic whistle stuck to a hollow rubber ball. Squeeze the ball, the whistle whistles and the lamp turns on.

As a teenager I enjoyed it, but I'm sure the adults thought it got old really quickly.