It's pretty cool in that commodity integrated hardware is capable of doing something practical at those frequencies. Not long ago it was a struggle to get the Pro Audio Spectrum ISA card working at all.
It's awful in that using the auditory domain is too much an intrusion into the human space. There is enough noise pollution. Interference patterns around the room may generate harmonics at audible frequencies. Young kids can hear high frequencies we forgot we ever could. I can still hear CRT flybacks. Sometimes I thought I heard something electronic in conference rooms but convinced myself it was nothing.
Someone else was complaining about it affecting their cochlear implant. That is horrifying.
It is not so farfetched that it has an adverse affect on health either. America is losing diplomats left and right to some mysterious ultrasonic weapon, or at least that is one of the leading theories.
It is awful that my CPU has to be constantly running a FFT to read this signal. I think Apple has an ASIC which does the Siri voice recognition.
It's awful that it triggers the orange light to be constantly on so you end up ignoring it. What if Zoom is simultaneously using the microphone stream for nefarious purposes.
This is what Bluetooth was made for. This is a worse idea than Wifi over lighting. Even the 9-digit Zoom dial codes are better.
>Someone else was complaining about it affecting their cochlear implant. That is horrifying.
Definitely.
>It is awful that my CPU has to be constantly running a FFT to read this signal. I think Apple has an ASIC which does the Siri voice recognition.
Isn't it the zoom box that has to be doing the detection? The pc is just sending the signal, which wouldn't take much processing.
>It's awful that it triggers the orange light to be constantly on so you end up ignoring it.
I think someone commented that's for the purpose of detecting if someone is muted and notifying them. Still, there should definitely be a choice to disable this behavior. I wouldn't be able to ignore it.
>What if Zoom is simultaneously using the microphone stream for nefarious purposes.
There's a lot of nefarious things they could potentially do even without using the mic, considering it's software already running on your pc that already has an encrypted connection to their servers.
> Isn't it the zoom box that has to be doing the detection? The pc is just sending the signal, which wouldn't take much processing.
If the PC were just sending the signal it wouldn't need the microphone to be on. And it would stop working when people turn off their speakers like a lot of people do in a busy meeting room.
By the way there seem to be other ways to do it too. Not sure if it's Bluetooth but MS Teams warned me in the past that I was in a room with a Surface display (the huge first generation one). It doesn't keep the microphone active though.. I never investigated how it figured that.
When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can't imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paralyzed right there in front of mom, unable to even talk or shout, for at least 15 seconds, but it seemed like forever. It's weird because I knew to only touch insulator. I somehow fell off it and then unplugged it. I slunk away without her finding out, but my arm had a strange feeling for a while.
In theory, plugging both of them into the same circuit (such as two plugs in one receptacle) shouldn't damage anything as far as I know. Of course, it won't do anything useful, and if the plug is not polarized then there's a good chance of plugging it in backwards and shorting out the circuit.
And, as you learned then, there is a great danger of accidentally touching the live end. "Proper" use of this, if there is such a thing, would dictate plugging the load in first, then the supply, but in this case there was supply on both ends.
It was like that, but with light string style piggyback plugs on both ends. So the non-wall side could have been in the middle of a bunch of piggybacked plugs, but there would still be two exposed, energized prongs on whatever it was plugged into.
I've built one of these. Good fun, but of course battery life does not match the 7+ years of the original. I think mine lasted close to a year?
If I remember correctly the magnetometer was end of life, but not critial to it's operation.
I'm not the original author, but I am considering ordering a few new boards and maybe the components. If you're really interested, give a shout on github: https://github.com/carrotIndustries/pluto/issues/1
It's awful in that using the auditory domain is too much an intrusion into the human space. There is enough noise pollution. Interference patterns around the room may generate harmonics at audible frequencies. Young kids can hear high frequencies we forgot we ever could. I can still hear CRT flybacks. Sometimes I thought I heard something electronic in conference rooms but convinced myself it was nothing.
Someone else was complaining about it affecting their cochlear implant. That is horrifying.
It is not so farfetched that it has an adverse affect on health either. America is losing diplomats left and right to some mysterious ultrasonic weapon, or at least that is one of the leading theories.
It is awful that my CPU has to be constantly running a FFT to read this signal. I think Apple has an ASIC which does the Siri voice recognition.
It's awful that it triggers the orange light to be constantly on so you end up ignoring it. What if Zoom is simultaneously using the microphone stream for nefarious purposes.
This is what Bluetooth was made for. This is a worse idea than Wifi over lighting. Even the 9-digit Zoom dial codes are better.