I love reading about interesting problems and creative ways to solve them. I used to wish for the same. But then I was given a super annoying one.
In my apartment I heard this beep about once every 90 seconds or so. I tried ignoring it for a while hoping it'd go away. And just so at the right frequency and infrequent enough Impossible to determine direction. But also just loud enough to be annoying after hours and hours. I spent several hours trying to pinpoint it. Including putting my head up agaisnt numerous neighbors doors to see if it was coming thru the walls.
I ended up downloading a dozen different audio apps for phone. And found only one that gave out an accurate enough histogram of dB volume level. Most weren't good enough. I needed to differentiate between 2 and most were sensitive enough of reading. I was able to triangulate the direction thru several patient iterations.
Turns out it was coming thru the wall.
Be careful what you wish for. Because you might end up with something arbitrarily dumb and annoying!
I was renting in a century-old house that had been converted into apartments. Every night, around midnight, this very high-pitched hum would start, and continue until almost dawn. None of the other residents ever heard it when they were around. While the exact timing varied, the time during which it happened overlapped with my sleep schedule (I was working a late tech support shift at the time) and it kept me awake. Earplugs didn't really seem to help.
There didn't seem to be any obvious source. I did exhaustive work to try and track it down - even got the permission of the owner and my fellow tenants to try shutting off the power at the breaker box in the middle of the night to see if that helped. (It didn't.)
It wasn't always constant, but it was around enough and preventing me from sleeping enough that I was going slowly insane. I had my ears checked for tinnitus - nope, I had and still have darn good hearing. I started reading about the Taos hum, looking into resonant frequencies, and finally stumbled across the answer.
The noise started a little while after everyone in the building went to bed. It stopped shortly after they got up in the morning. It was the sound of the century-old plumbing system at full pressure. If I just left a tap open a trickle, and the noise went away along with my sleep-deprivation.
20 years ago, in my first graduate job, we were issued pagers. One day my friend lost his - and it was on silent mode. We really didn't want to tell the company that it had disappeared.
Then we remembered that, at a certain time - I recall it being reasonably late at night - the device would emit a single, short, beep. I don't remember why, but even on silent mode, that beep would sound.
At five minutes to the hour - because this thing's clock wasn't synchronised, and we didn't know how accurate it was - we all positioned ourselves around the house. Silent as a mouse we waited, until - yes! - there it is, somewhere upstairs.
Now that we knew that it was actually in the house, it was just a matter of finding the thing. It was in his pants pocket - but they way they were folded in the wardrobe, the pocket wasn't where you'd expect it to be if you did a casual "pat the pockets" to see if it was in there.
Eventually a spark of inspiration hit me, and I reached up and pulled the cord on the window blinds behind the computer desk. I found myself nose to beak (through glass) with a startled mockingbird. "Beep?" it said, and flew off.
Eventually I decided to move out, for other reasons. My last act after everything was out of the place was to buy a cheap battery powered alarm clock, sat on a high shelf in a bedroom closet in a hard to see spot, programmed to go off at 2am every night for 5 minutes.
Oh good God, this happens to me every time one of my smoke alarm batteries starts to go. I have 6 smoke detectors and an older home where they're not all wired/battery back-up but rather all battery powered.
The "chirp at 90 second interval" thing is the worst design in the universe and it bites me every time. If I didn't know any better -- since there is no clock device and these things are not networked in any way -- I'd swear they are also programmed to only start chirping between the hours of 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM. I've lived here 10 years. I have never had one of these fail in the morning, middle of the day or afternoon; only in the middle of the night. Hunting down the one of the six devices that is failing with its way-too-infrequent chirp that's so high-pitched, only a dog could figure out where it's coming from, is made extra fun when you're in the fantastic mood that being awoken from a pleasant dream in the middle of the night and have the joy of hunting it down in your boxers in a cold house.
How much more complicated would it have been to also include a visual indicator. The things have an LED on them that continues to blink as the battery dies. Why not also have it either stop blinking (to conserve battery) or blink faster -- anything to make it easier to identify which of the infernal, identical, devices is in need of a 9-volt.
Thankfully, they're due for replacement this year. Now I have to research which of the models that are available handle this circumstance with a little more intelligence (that don't cost a hundred bucks a pop). This is such an easy-to-solve problem -- I don't want a "smart smoke detector", I want a $25 one that A) detects smoke and B) reports when it needs other attention in a way that is useful. Heck, I'd pay an extra $10 for the latter feature even knowing it would cost them no more than the "dumb chirp" method.
There was a very bad house fire a few miles from me about a year ago and the person who lived there died in their sleep while the fire raged. The rumor was that the home had a bunch of smoke detectors without batteries in it and it was spread through our neighborhood as a "cautionary tale". I'm willing to bet there's a story of being woken up in the middle of the night for a battery change chirp in there somewhere.
(You can troll people into thinking you have magical powers, rub the batteries of a just-failing calculator/scale/wristwatch in your hands and you'll get another ten minutes of use out of them)
You can get a smoke alarm with 10 year battery life to reduce the likelihood of this happening. When all are purchased in one batch, you can then pretty much replace them all at once -- if first battery goes, next ones are soon to follow.
I got some unconventional looking ones from Jalo Helsinki [1] for my house. They work well and look good. However, I know some people working at Jalo, so my opinion is biased. There are several other long battery-life smoke alarms on the market from different manufacturers to choose from.
[1] https://www.jalohelsinki.com/product-category/smoke-alarms-1...
If I'd had a baseball bat or wooden sword, I'd have smashed that thing free like a piñata!
That said, everyone should check their alarms at least once. You should be able to find appropriate "testers" to purchase with alarms. I use CO alarms at the place I live in (gas-heated water), and each of them I tested with what I affectionately call "carbon monoxide in a spray can".
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=C6...
This in fact is a very popular around the world electronic kit for beginner hobbyists, because it's trivial to build and has only few components. I remember it from electronics magazines in Poland.
Next day, enraged, we tried again. Eventually we found it in the bathroom trash can.
The designer apparently thought that emitting a single beep every five minutes or so would be an awesome low battery indicator.
I didn't know what kind of thing was making the beep, naturally, which was unhelpful.
It took about a month of me slowly going mad before I finally found the thing at the back of a desk drawer.
My solution is to just change all the batteries at once so i dont have to guess (and if you guess wrong you then you wont sleep tomorrow because of the beeping)
I wish there was some visual indicator to tell which one was faulty.
I bought half a dozen of them to install in our new house years ago, thinking the nightly find-the-beeping-^+=¥€ games were finally a thing of the past.
When one started beeping, I did the rounds, figuring I'd be back in bed in minutes. Well, I wasn't. Turned out the fool-proof indication was to have the normally green LED flash red instead.
Did I mention that I am colour blind?
I had this happen a few months ago except it wasn't a low battery alarm. It kept yelling "FIRE FIRE" but then turning off. Of course FirstAlert apparently doesn't indicate which alarm is causing it. They say the initiating one flashes a different pattern but I didn't find one. Ended up, after getting no sleep at all, replacing all 9 of them with nests. At least then if one fails I'll know which one.
Manufacturers can get away with it because even if they screw up, an angry customer doesn't really affect their sales in any meaningful way.
A few years ago I used "Find my iPhone" to chase down my phone in the house, buried under some pile or another. Unfortunately I had earlier been using AirPlay to play music through remote speakers, so of course the emergency tone played through the speakers, not the device.
I had high suspicion that it was that. But not hearing it thru neighbors door. And with how loud it was and the fact I could hear it thru my front door and not theirs. Made the hunt for it so much harder.
If you can't get an alarm to shut-off or stop beeping, no matter what you try, then give serious thought to the possibility that there's a second alarm nearby which is the source of the noise.
After 3 goddamn hours of searching, and having run to the store to buy 9-volts and replaced every goddamn battery in the house, we found a carbon monoxide alarm thrown INSIDE the return air duct of the HVAC unit...
To my ears it always sounded the same volume. And to some apps. It wasn't considered loud enough to be read in a meaningful way.
I was a noobie computer programmer in my first job. After being there for a few months my mouse started to have issues. It stuttered and refused to move correctly.
So I'd take the little grey ball out and clean it and it'd be OK again. But the next day it'd do it again.
So I ended up with the cleanest fucking mouse on planet earth. Yet every so often it'd stop working... on parts of the screen. Other parts it'd work. I ended up using the keyboard a lot.
The mouse would work fine all day some days. Some days it would work fine until about 2PM then it may or may not work.
Eventually I figured out that when the sun shone through the window it created a beam across my mouse mat. When the mouse was moved into the beam it would stop working. So I took it to bits and discovered that the ball would roll a little disc, that disc had little holes in it, there was also an LED and a photodetector. So the mouse was counting the blips in light to determine the movement in the mouse. I guess the cheap plastic was allowing the bright sunlight to bleed through the case causing the photodetctor to go bonkers.
A secondary thing about that cheap as shit PC was you could hear the video card render the screen. It'd buzz when the screen was mostly blue, when it was white it would be silent.
Of course opening a mouse up and not breaking it is quite hard, they're made to break and be replaced. Current bugbear is Logitech keyboard stand pieces that appear only to be there to break and thus require keyboard replacement - again it seems a design with a penny's more of plastic would be almost invincible.
site:reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport printer stopped working skylight
Even worse than that I had already saved the post when I read it the first time.
Ubuntu doesn't print to Brother printers on Tuesdays.
Moved the VGA away from the RCA, no buzz now.
Talking to my father in the morning, he indicated that his neighbor had taken up Ham radio and he was having to put filters on various devices to reduce interference. To this day, I wonder if his spotty wifi in the house is related to his neighbor turning his system...
I knew someone who lived two blocks from a radio station, and they would get interference everywhere, there would be staticky top 40 music coming from the phones, from clock radios, from the stereo. It would come and go. They would complain, the radio station would fix something, but in a few months it would be back.
He was probably onto something.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/coat-hanger-wire-is-just-as-goo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHSuInSkHtA
Listening to the tranmission using the arc the tower generates to ground!
For your list, and I’d do a) and not bother with b) and c) as a) eliminates them well enough (point the emitters away from the alarm sensors). For d), I’d put a light cloth in the tailpipe, enough that it will change the exhaust note across RPM range, but the car will still run. Your suggestion leaves the slight possibility of a false positive if we accidentally hit the resonant rpm range. For experimentation only, don’t drive to work a banana in your tailpipe.
One last one: throw it in reverse near the house, but not in your driveway. Could be some weird parabolic blah blah acoustic thing focus thumpy exhaust waves at the house sensors.
I suppose there’s the possibility that a 2.4Ghz radio transmitter of some sort could be responsible, but this way out there and would be way down in my list. SDR and a dongle would be handy here.
> What does your neighbor think of this lmao
> > I don't have time to stay around because I tend to lag for work and have to leave as soon as I do get to my car.
How ... convenient.
I bought an electricity usage monitor plug and started to measure every electricity consuming stuff, but couldn't account for more than 3 or 4 daily kWH. Then I went in vacation for one week, turning off almost everything in the house, and the electricity consumption, that I can check every day, had barely moved. Something was consuming at least 20kWH every day in my home and I didn't know what it was.
At the same time in prevision of the winter, I bought a thermal IR camera to spot isolation problems. I started to play around with it, and discovered a fairly large hot spot in the bathroom, on the bottom of the bathtub. Touching it with the hand, it sure felt warmer than you would expect from a baththub. Maybe it was some hot water? But the water heater was on gas and my gas bill was fairly normal. The hotspot would also not go away after hours. Then I remember a visiting friend remarking weeks ago that my bathroom was warmer than the rest of the appartment.
To test my suspicions, I tried to play with the electricity meter of the appartment. After some experiments, I found out a switch that would turn off the mysterious heat source. The baththub started to cool down and the power usage displayed went down to 0. My theory was validated! Something under my bathroom was drawing around 800W constantly every hour of the day and every day of the week and that was making my appartment so hot in summer and my bill so large.
At this point, the only thing I could do was contacting my landlord and detailing my findings. It turned out he had installed a dehumidifer in the basement the year before to dry out the air and fight a moisture problem, but he had configured it to a very low setting, like 30% humidity and that was making it work constantly. The dehumidifer was installed just below my bathtub and its operation was heating it at the same time. Since it was an old home he had bought out a few years before, he didn't know where the basement was drawing its electricity from. Well now he does.
He reimbursed me the electricity and changed the settings of the machine and then my electricity consumption went to almost nothing... until november came and the cold of the last weeks of fall started to hit Montreal, but that's another story.
That way they can see debug output of what happens when he hits reverse.
[as someone else already said]
Weird EM interference from electronics, ultrasonic backup sensors, Magic Stuff Related To Reverse #1.
> Alternatively, if the alarm did go off, this ex-mechanic would be at a loss as to how a car with no powered systems could do that.
Maybe it was caused by Magic Stuff Related To Reverse #2, or maybe it turns out the system is actually powered when you thought it isn't.
Looking over your other comments in this thread, I feel like you're approaching the topic from a position of someone who's an expert in cars and electronics, and thus has almost everything important in their memory already. But in cases when one isn't an expert with a thing one's debugging, I'd err on the side of doing the tests that seem ridiculous, at least if they're cheap to do. Discovering that it's probably Magic Stuff Related To Reverse #1 is a fair result, and should then be followed by reading up on what else gets activated/actuated when one's car gets switched to reverse.
From what I heard this is not uncommon.
There's a lot of options to try to isolate the problem, just thinking out loud here -
a) Back into the driveway returning from work. See if alarm goes off. Next morning, see if alarm goes off as you drive out.
b) Remove fuse for reverse assistant. (Stupid sensor thinking IR, ultrasound or RF sure-fire sign of break-in)
c) Remove fuse for reverse light. (Stupid motion detector confusing light for potential intruder)
d) Rev it up a little before shifting into reverse. (In case a resonance is the cause)
e) Roll out of the driveway in neutral. (Would be surprised if this triggered anything - if the car's movement was the cause, alarm wouldn't go off immediately upon shifting into reverse, only when it moved)
f) (...)