Locating the source of a mysterious beep

pavo-etc

Woah this is cool. Another interesting simonw project based around sound through browsers. Lots of simple real world problems that can be tackled with this.

tristanj

You can also solve this in O(logn) using a physical binary search: 1) Move half the boxes to another room. 2) Listen for a beep and determine which room the beep comes from. 3) Take the boxes in that room and split them in half again. 4) Repeat until one box is left.

delichon

Could you build this into a HUD for a cat, tuned to mouse squeeks? Asking for a friend.

solyin

MKBHD demos the the FOTRIC TD2e Acoustic Imaging Camera. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ai1gIWacf0I It costs ~$1,000 so you'd probably rent it if you're only going to use it once, but it's a neat gadget.

gwbas1c

You know what might have been easier... Going through the boxes!

raldi

WHAT WAS MAKING THE BEEP!!?!?!

adm4

wonderful! Thanks for sharing. I thought about doing this to track the sounds moving around in my stomach... it is interesting how well the mic on your smartphone works at picking up stomach sounds

gregsadetsky

Simon's LLM's beeping finder app vs https://annoyingpcb.com/ Who would win?? :-) I lack the courage to plant such a PCB prank device... it really feels like you could drive people completely crazy haha

hk1337

I wonder if it would work to find an annoyatron?

hinkley

I had a beep that drove me crazy and the very long search turned up a surplus CO monitor that I didn’t recall buying and had gotten tucked into the laundry room for some reason. Same brand as my smoke detectors. Make sounds that can be detected directionally, assholes.

pizzafeelsright

Smoke alarm.

davio

https://www.metafilter.com/42331/ScoobyDoo-and-the-case-of-t...

simonw

I didn't mention this in the article, but this isn't the first time my family has been driven almost spare by a mysterious, hard-to-track beep. Our dog goes outside and hides in the lavender bush if a smoke alarm starts making a "I need a battery" noise. So I went into this project with the attitude that I would like to solve this class of problem forever .

caseyf7

Great post. Many levels of interesting information. Any sense of how much this cost?

gouggoug

This article is about a weekend project and not a serious product, so what I'm saying below is not criticizing the author's approach — I'm making a point about something tangential. The post touches on my biggest pet peeves about how many software engineers currently use AI at work: they ask it to "write out a problems.md file describing the problem we want to solve" then lob the output over the fence for the rest of the engineering org to review, often times without even disclosing they used AI to generate it (it's, of course, obvious). AI can not do the reasoning for us; thinking that because it is great at writing code that works, the same applies to documents whose primary purpose is to demonstrate critical thinking, explore trade-offs, and reason through a problem is absurd. In fact (or IMO?), this "problems.md" document is entirely unnecessary. In many cases, simply describing the issue and providing the relevant context is enough for AI to come up with a working solution. AI can not do critical thinking (yet), so don't ask it to (and stop sending your fellow software engineers AI-slop RFCs).

uptrails

I'm only here with a friendly tip for the designers of beeping devices: make sure to gradually ramp high-pitched beeps up and down, so that there's no sharp edge that an adversary could time.

NitpickLawyer

Ha! This reminded me of that old famous entry from bash org: "I can't find a server in my house. It responds to ping, but I can't physically locate it."