19 ms·
Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? Would be great fun tracking down the source of the problem (if it was my car; probably less so if
by lb1lf 9y ago
Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? Would be great fun tracking down the source of the problem (if it was my car; probably less so if I was in the house...)
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) (...)
- macns 9y agof) Try putting car in reverse with the engine off [as someone else already said]
- mikestew 9y agoI’d be super surprised if that turned up anything. For one thing, okay, we did that and the alarm didn’t go off. What did we eliminate? 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. At that point my suggestion is to call a priest.
- bigiain 9y agoTheres a small but non zero chance it's something to do with ultrasonic backup sensors - so I'd try this with everything powered up but without the engine running, mostly because it's a super easy test rather than any real expectation that it'd be the problem.
- mikestew 9y agoAh, engine off, but powered electronics, got it. Yeah, small chance of finding a bug but offset by being an inexpensive test to run.
- mort96 9y agoWell, putting it in reverse with the engine off but with electronics on would potentially let us rule out anything related to sound from the engine, and would mean it's more likely something related to electromagnetic waves or something else coming from the onboard electronics.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> For one thing, okay, we did that and the alarm didn’t go off. What did we eliminate? 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.
- Namrog84 9y ago> Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? 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!
- sillysaurus3 9y agoSo what was it?
- miles 9y agoAnd what was the app?
- Namrog84 9y agoI forget now. Was over a year ago now. It was just one that allowed me to zoom in on a specific point in the past 60 seconds of sound in real time to see an exact dB reading for a very specific and tiny spike. 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.
- mixedCase 9y agoNot him but I'd bet 5 bucks it was a smoke alarm with depleted batteries.
- exabrial 9y agoI don't want to be your neighbor :P
- mikestew 9y agoOf what little I read of the reddit thread, there must not be many gear heads in there that debug software, too. I say that only because there is a lot of “it’s probably...” but no “try this, which will eliminate $FOO. Next, $BAR, which eliminates $FOOBAR.” 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.
- moftz 9y agoSeems like there are two possibilities: engine noise is causing windows to vibrate making a sensor go off or the reverse distance sensor that uses microwave radar (X band) is causing the base unit to think a sensor is going off. It is a WRX (lots of rumbling engine noise) so I would imagine that the first scenario is more likely. A home alarm system is most likely going to be 433MHz (or even the wifi/bluetooth bands) but not X band.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoTime for my story. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoHa, my mouse scroll partially stopped - turns out it's a rotary encoder like you describe, some of the gaps get blocked with dust and the mouse stops scrolling, a bit, still scrolls but seems intermittent (like a software issue), was a couple of days before I opened it up as I was looking for a fault in logs and such. 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.
- dghughes 9y agoI recall a story on reddit's talesfromtechsupport a printer would stop working at a certain time of day. I think it was near a skylight or something weird. I have no idea what it was about but your story jogged my memory but not enough to remember it all.
- 9y ago
- kelukelugames 9y agoHappened to me once and drove me nuts. And let me to fight with my housemates. Not worth it.
- dzhiurgis 9y agoMy fire alarm goes off once every few months at 3 AM. From what I heard this is not uncommon.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- toast0 9y agoTry cleaning it with a vacuum cleaner. Was listed in the manual for mine and it hasn't false alarmed in years since we did it.
- jbuzbee 9y agoHere's my odd story. Years ago, my wife and I were sleeping over at my parents house and we were awoken by garbled conversation from the clock radio. I sleepily checked it out and saw that the radio was turned off. Thinking that the on/off switch was broken, I just unplugged it. The garbled conversation continued. At this point I wondered if my parents house was built on top of an ancient burial ground... 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...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mindcrime 9y agoIt seems like a bit of a stretch, but in theory - depending on the details of the radio, and the power being emitted by the neighbor's station - you might be able to get some audio from a "powered off" radio. Maybe it's doing something like what happens when a crystal radio[1] absorbs enough power inductively to generate its audio. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI've heard stories of unplugged loudspeakers turning into AM radios with enough power pumped into the air, so there's that too.
- ckarmann 9y agoI had to debug my home this summer and I think it makes a good story. I have been renting this appartment on the ground floor for one year, and for environmental and economical reasons, I decided to try to reduce my electricity bill, which was quite large for the size of the appartment. An obvious culprit was the Canadian winter in a poorly isolated place, but I was also wondering about why in summer I had around 22-23 kWH of electricity consumption every day. I have no A/C, so I figured it was either my electronics or the appliances or a combination of both. 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.
- INTPenis 9y agoActually imo it makes most sense to call the alarm company and have them troubleshoot it while you're there with the car. That way they can see debug output of what happens when he hits reverse.
- mseebach 9y ago0) Ask neighbor if they have any idea what's going on. Modern alarms usually at least indicate which sensor triggered. > 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.