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Reminds me of my roommate’s Jambox bluetooth speaker years ago…I learned that it had this behavior while fully asleep at 4:30am after we’d had a party, when, ev

Reminds me of my roommate’s Jambox bluetooth speaker years ago…I learned that it had this behavior while fully asleep at 4:30am after we’d had a party, when, every few minutes it started loudly blasting “BOOOOP. LOW BATTERY” alerts. The trouble was that it was hidden somewhere in our messy living room, and the alerts weren’t frequent enough to find it quickly, so I was standing around in my underwear for ages, waiting for each subsequent alert and getting a bit closer each time, because it was too loud to go back to sleep.

emilecantin 5y ago
Sounds like the small slice of hell that is a low battery in most smoke detectors: one short (and loud AF) beep every ~15 minutes. Fine when you have only one, but in a large house you never know which one of these f*ckers is actually the one complaining.
- muttled 5y ago
  With Amazon Basics 9V batteries sitting at about $1.50 a piece, I've started the practice of just replacing all the smoke detector batteries when one of them starts getting low. When I get to the end of that supply, I'm going to switch to rechargeables and just recharge them all before they start chirping. One night of bad sleep from the option of laying awake, anticipating the next chirp, or going around the house changing batteries in the middle of the night isn't worth it.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  The first time I had this happen I didn't know what the sound was and it took me weeks to work out because it's so hard to locate where it comes from.
germinalphrase 5y ago
I once had an EE friend that built these tiny chips he called Annoyers. They simply emitted a loud chirp at a random time interval. The interval was too long to effectively locate the chip, and the chirp was terribly annoying. It could take weeks to find the quarter-sides device hidden in someone’s home (or the battery would just die). Of course, while he was explaining this to me, the chip slipped from my fingers and fell down an air vent of another friend’s living room. The comedic timing was perfect, and it really might have been the funniest thing to happen to me in 2012.
- slig 5y ago
  There's a commercial product called "Annoy-a-tron" that does that.
  - san-fran 5y ago
    When I started a new job at a NOC, I was pranked with one of those. I didn't know what to make of the odd recurring ~12khz beeps, and figured it was some old device slowly dying. So I pulled out a stopwatch to see if I could suss out the interval on the beeping. I was too focused on timing the beeps to notice my coworkers exchanging glances with each other after asking them, "Does anyone else hear that?" I found a pattern emerge. It repeated itself every 10 beeps or so, with irregular intervals between those beeps. Armed with that information, I could effectively predict the next beep within 3-5 seconds (intervals ranged between 3-10 minutes, if I recall.) So I started walking around the room, standing in different locations as I stared at my stopwatch. The farther apart the places I stood, the better chance I'd have of triangulating the source with each beep. I got within 3-5 feet of it in the ~300 square foot room before the coworkers came clean about what they had done. I wasn't even mad, I was having a blast!
    - slig 5y ago
      Cool story, your co-worker should've let you find it, so close!

emilecantin 5y ago

Sounds like the small slice of hell that is a low battery in most smoke detectors: one short (and loud AF) beep every ~15 minutes. Fine when you have only one, but in a large house you never know which one of these f*ckers is actually the one complaining.

muttled 5y ago
With Amazon Basics 9V batteries sitting at about $1.50 a piece, I've started the practice of just replacing all the smoke detector batteries when one of them starts getting low. When I get to the end of that supply, I'm going to switch to rechargeables and just recharge them all before they start chirping. One night of bad sleep from the option of laying awake, anticipating the next chirp, or going around the house changing batteries in the middle of the night isn't worth it.
Gigachad 5y ago
The first time I had this happen I didn't know what the sound was and it took me weeks to work out because it's so hard to locate where it comes from.

germinalphrase 5y ago

I once had an EE friend that built these tiny chips he called Annoyers. They simply emitted a loud chirp at a random time interval. The interval was too long to effectively locate the chip, and the chirp was terribly annoying. It could take weeks to find the quarter-sides device hidden in someone’s home (or the battery would just die). Of course, while he was explaining this to me, the chip slipped from my fingers and fell down an air vent of another friend’s living room. The comedic timing was perfect, and it really might have been the funniest thing to happen to me in 2012.

slig 5y ago
There's a commercial product called "Annoy-a-tron" that does that.
- san-fran 5y ago
  When I started a new job at a NOC, I was pranked with one of those. I didn't know what to make of the odd recurring ~12khz beeps, and figured it was some old device slowly dying. So I pulled out a stopwatch to see if I could suss out the interval on the beeping. I was too focused on timing the beeps to notice my coworkers exchanging glances with each other after asking them, "Does anyone else hear that?" I found a pattern emerge. It repeated itself every 10 beeps or so, with irregular intervals between those beeps. Armed with that information, I could effectively predict the next beep within 3-5 seconds (intervals ranged between 3-10 minutes, if I recall.) So I started walking around the room, standing in different locations as I stared at my stopwatch. The farther apart the places I stood, the better chance I'd have of triangulating the source with each beep. I got within 3-5 feet of it in the ~300 square foot room before the coworkers came clean about what they had done. I wasn't even mad, I was having a blast!
  - slig 5y ago
    Cool story, your co-worker should've let you find it, so close!