14 ms·
Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors
- tetris11 6mo agoIm not sure I got it. It generates acoustic signals and a microphone server picks them up. If so, will it penetrate through walls?
- fragmede 6mo agoThe microphone is on a smart watch the user is wearing.
- croes 6mo agoDo you need a signal that tells you the window is open if you are in the same room?
- hilti 6mo agoIf you are constantly looking at your smartphone and ignore the real world ... yes ;-)
- SimplyUnknown 6mo agoObviously not, but there is larger potential than that. A microphone in a watch or phone can pick up the signal and relay the trigger to another server via for example MQTT. Then, you can have homeassistant act upon this signal. The flow is then Open door --> Signal triggers --> Signal caught by microphone --> Microphone device relays to server --> Server turns on smart lighting in that room. There is a lot more that you can do, but this is just an example. The microphone to pick it up is a limitations, but the gain is: - reduced power usage as the signal generators are not power-operated - less waste as no empty batteries need to be discarded (if non-rechargeable batteries are used) - improved security because the signal generators are not connected to the internet, reducing the attack surface.
- fragmede 6mo agoNow imagine you're living with 10 people at a facility/station/factory/depot, and there are 5 windows across a dozen externally facing rooms.
- alberto467 6mo agoCan i not trigger the automations from my smart watch then?
- ga_to 6mo agoSure could, but then you would need to do the thing AND think about doing the triggering and then find the trigger button on your watch. This way you wouldn't have to think about it, because it's automated. Triggering something manually also doesn't really count as 'automation' I would say.
- croes 6mo agoUnlikely because it’s ultrasonic sound, at least if you have brick walls. Could work for drywalls
- jacquesm 6mo agoNot a chance. Drywall will absorb this like a sponge. These frequencies are really high and will reflect off hard or thin surfaces, drywall is relatively soft, more often than not has insulation packed into the center and is usually covered in some kind of stucco or grout. Zero chance of penetration. Just stand on the other side of a drywall and see how well high pitched normally audible sounds get through vs the much lower frequency sounds. It sounds decidedly muffled because all the high has been absorbed.
- lesuorac 6mo agoWell, idk if these do but you can certainly make passive devices that penetrate walls. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
- jacquesm 6mo agoRadio waves != sound waves.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- combocosmo 6mo agoIt's a unique idea that I could see being useful in select situations. The reliance on wearable microphones sounds like a downside. Also I guess this might be annoying for pets that can hear well beyond 20 kHz.
- cyberax 6mo agoTrivia time! The first practical wireless remote control for TVs also used ultrasound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLPk1Us62xQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLPk1Us62xQ
- buescher 6mo agoRight, and they were superseded by battery-powered infrared remotes for good reasons. I would recommend revisiting those reasons before proposing this sort of technology for wireless sensors.
- alnwlsn 6mo agoMostly it was that electronics got cheap enough that you didn't need to keep building the bulky and expensive mechanical version. The first wireless remotes that used batteries were still ultrasonic, they just generated the tone electronically instead of by striking a metal bar. Plus, you could have way more buttons with an electric version; you would need a bar per function for the mechanical way.
- jacquesm 6mo agoAnd that's just signalling, not power delivery.
- ogig 6mo agoI can see some uses, but calling this system batteries free seems a stretch. A sensor is worth nothing if it can't be read, and to read this you need a powered microphone and computing. Some already common magnetic door systems do the same; door plate and magnet movement is enough to create a detectable current, (using no external power), then that signal is read and computed by an electronic/digital system (using power).
- phh 6mo agoI'm on the side of "clever, fun, but feels useless". But to defend the project, all sensors require a powered central system. It's pretty common for Zigbee to have one repeater per room [1], which is just what is needed for this system. [1] Because any AC-powered Zigbee device is a repeater, so just a bulb or a plug is enough
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6mo agoEven the layout you describe has massive advantages over the status quo from a placement perspective. Having a reduced footprint device that goes in the actual measurement location that can phone home to a more robust central location like this is not only already very common but also the existing solutions that do it still suffer from the design constraint of requiring a battery which this innovation goes a long way towards
- harg 6mo agoThere already exists "kinetic" switches for lights etc whose switch contains some passive electronics that when actuated produces enough energy to emit a radio signal that can be read by a relay module. They're pretty handy as you can basically place the switch anywhere you want without the need for the wires to be there. The relay can live in the light fitting or somewhere else convenient. There's probably no reason why these kinetic switches can't also be used for detecting other events like doors opening/closing etc. I feel like a radio signal is a bit more reliable and easier to detect than high frequency sound. I also think calling these a "sensor" is a bit of a stretch. They detect events but have no knowledge of the current state of the thing they're sensing. E.g. the can detect a door opening/closing, but have no idea if the door is open or closed at a given time
- buescher 6mo agoPiezo harvesting switches and similar (I think there’s a flywheel design out there too) are quite expensive, not terribly reliable or consistent, and require substantial activation force. Conventional switches and batteries that can last for years in remote push buttons and sensors are extremely inexpensive in volume.
- IshKebab 6mo agoThe Quinetic switches I use are extremely reliable and consistent. I've been mentally making a note of when the switch does not trigger the light, and it actually hasn't happened once yet and I've been using them for about 10 years. You're right that they're expensive and need a decent activation force. They also are quite large and make a quite loud clicking noise which might be annoying for a sensor application.
- taco_emoji 6mo agoThe ones I have in my house [0] were not that expensive and have been quite reliable for years now. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MHL8QTC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MHL8QTC
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- kumarvvr 6mo agoWould these maintain their signature under repeated use? Or regular wear and tear?
- deckar01 6mo agoI have a suspicion the room reverb of anything other than that guy’s lab is enough to break it.
- anVlad11 6mo agoIt's research, not a product. Even with that, framing it as a smart home sensor in the press release is a stretch. 1) 93.75% success rate in controlled conditions, 92.1% in a somewhat-realistic deployment scenario - too low for reliability. I wouldn't use something like that to trigger smart home automations. 2) Range hardcapped at ~1m due to how ultrasound works, you can't centralize detection. Their answer is to give everyone in the household a wearable receiver, which is eeeeeeeh idk, doesn't look consumer-friendly to me. 3) Paper suggests a mix of durable and consumable parts for the transmitter. Their numbers show that the 3d-printed PLA cantilever needs to be replaced every 900 cycles or so. Should work fine, but... 4) ...every transmitter pair needs to be tuned per-setup, every time. Not a plug&play in the consumer sense.
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoFrom the artwork it looks like they're targeting industrial use. Seems like a low grade replacement for bar/qr code scanning. The "wearable" (more likely integrated into some other thing than worn IMO) receiver seems to point in that direction too. Author probably has a specific use case in mind. Probably some application where EM emissions are undesirable or power is complicated that has thus far resisted automated industrial data entry. Investigating the use of something like ultrasound would align with constraints like that. Someone (department head? PR department?) said that was too niche and to make up some bullshit with mass market appeal.
- abirch 6mo ago5) These can be great if you want them to be monitored, but if I'm using my wife's toilet when I'm not supposed to, I'll simply hold the disk when I lift the seat.
- nine_k 6mo agoCould be more interesting for hard-to-reach underwater sensors. Water attenuates RF quite severely, but is good at conducting ultrasound. The response would have to be in ultrasound, too, of course.
- svnt 6mo agoThis is the big constraint: > 2) Range hardcapped at ~1m due to how ultrasound works, you can't centralize detection. Their answer is to give everyone in the household a wearable receiver, which is eeeeeeeh idk, doesn't look consumer-friendly to me. Sure yes if you could do this with an always-listening smartphone or smartwatch that would be workable, but even then it constrains it to an occupant-activity detector. Fixing that would require in the best case prompting an app install when visitors arrive. And still it is deaf to any other changes such as a door closing in the wind. All possible, but feels several technosocial cycles away. Interesting to think about anyway.
- chakintosh 6mo ago> ... and counting reps in the gym People need smart devices to count their reps !?
- retired 6mo agoNo, but it’s nice if the reps are automatically fed into my spreadsheet for keeping track of progress.
- xoa 6mo agoFor a brief, beautiful moment from the headline I thought "oh good, more PoE sensors finally happening!" doho. But no not just about battery but any power at all, and an interesting approach for further research. Of course to actually get data from still requires powered devices but in a lot of cases it'd be much easier to have that be a single or small number of more easily placed central units vs every single sensor tag separately. Ultra low cost and simplicity are values all their own in terms of applications. My biggest immediately question though and one I'm a little surprised not see addressed, even at the research stage, is any mention of other animals. There is a bunch there about the ultrasonic frequency being well above the human limit of ~20 kHz. But IIRC for example dogs can hear up to like 45-60 kHz, and cats all the way to 65-85 kHz. I assume lots and lots of other animals also can perceive sounds well beyond human senses. Noise pollution is already a somewhat unrecognized but big problem for all sorts of life around us (not that it's irrelevant to human health either), so if more use of ultrasonics made that worse that's a concern. And as a practical matter the product market is probably going to shrink pretty dramatically if it drives pets mad, a lot of people have pets nowadays they care about a great deal. For that matter even in public environments if it messed with service dogs that might have ADA or equivalent implications. Still, good reminder of various side channels one doesn't always think about.
- dn3500 6mo agoChildren too. My own hearing extended to about 23 kHz until I was in my early 20s, and I don't think I was exceptional. There was a jewelry store in my town that I couldn't go in to because the "ultrasonic" motion detector was so painfully loud. But I doubt these devices would be a problem for children or pets because the pulse is so short.
- simpleintheory 6mo agoAre you sure it wasn’t one of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito
- dn3500 6mo ago
- mystraline 6mo agoWhere the profit in acoustic tuned sensors? Sensors must be using batteries, wear out in a month or so, tied to an oppressive cloud seevice, and regular up-sells of things that would be standard but we stratified types of paying users. For a dotedu, this is perfectly fine. But this wouldn't pass muster as a real product. You can't do all the HorribleUsesAsAService like almost all IoT hardware is.
- therealfigtree 6mo agoTitlegore
- Zigurd 6mo agoMy father was an engineer at Zenith when they were developing the Space Command TV remote control. This was a couple years before I was born, so by the time I got interested in hacking, Zenith TVs with this remote were commonplace. When visiting my friends homes I would prank them by jangling my keys and making the TV louder or quieter and randomly change channels. This presents new opportunities.
- mmooss 6mo agoWow, I never heard of these. They operated on sound. Here's an article with photos, including some internals and the history of its engineering: https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remote-control-button-of-the-month https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remot... I wonder how reliable they were?
- MrEricSir 6mo agoNot very reliable. The remote only had four buttons (volume up/down, channel up/down) and various sounds like kitchen appliances, flushing toilets, and jingling keys would be interpreted as remote control actions by the TV. My grandfather had one; he seemed to find it more entertaining to talk to people about it than to actual use it.
- jacquesm 6mo agoBlaupunkt (in the early 80s) had a similar system which was a lot more reliable also based on ultrasound, they used an encoding that was a bit less likely to show up in normal environmental sounds.
- mmooss 6mo agoDoesn't / didn't Blaupunkt make hi-fidelity audio equipment? I would think the range of sounds output by its speakers would make finding distinct sounds difficult. Maybe their audio expertise came in handy.
- NoSalt 6mo ago> "and cost only a few cents each" Now companies are desperately trying to figure out how to jack up the price to $10.00 each without us knowing they are ripping us off.
- mschuster91 6mo agoInteresting idea and reminds me of the German train security system PZB which acts completely electricity-free at the signal - a mechanical switch connects a capacitor to de-tune a magnetic resonance circuit, which is then detected by a passing train's magloop transmitter. Unfortunately... I see issues: > Those frequencies are above 20 kilohertz, which is the upper limit of sounds humans can hear. Yeah. Humans' range ends there, at least in adulthood. But what about pets? Wildlife? Children and toddlers? Or just people that take care of their hearing by not frying their ears with too much exposure to loudness? It's already an issue with "mosquito teenager repellant" devices.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoWe've come full circle; one of first TV remotes used tuned pipes to generate sound driving the circuitry
- itissid 6mo agoWonderful. ultrasonic range emission having high S/N is amazing too. My hero usecase for this is to use these for behavioral therapy: Have a ring or a bracelet, thus without reaching for a phone or a notepad, record when a negative thought happens, i.e. a counter, or generate a sequence of ultrasonic sounds to map to specific kinds of thoughts. Have a sensor record and log them. I would then analyze the data across multiple days. My current method is recording them in obsidian.
- rustyhancock 6mo agoIf you're old enough you might remember the Zenith Space Commander (I'm not old enough to have seen one in use). It was an early TV remote that used spring loaded strikers controlled by buttons on the remote. The strikers hit tuned metal bars that rang out at ultrasonic frequencies the TV detected. A links below but honestly it's the kind of topic that seems to never be covered well by a single resource. There are YouTube videos showing the inside of the controller and the striker. [0] https://forums.atari.io/topic/10559-zenith-space-command-vintage-tv-remote-control-that-didnt-use-batteries-or-electronics/ https://forums.atari.io/topic/10559-zenith-space-command-vin...
- superxpro12 6mo agoThis is a very clever idea. However i think almost all smartphone microphone recorders cap out at 44.1khz or 48khz sample rate. Some have 96khz, but im not sure what is compatible with modern devices. That's going to limit how much frequency spectrum these fingerprints have to work with.
- tencentshill 6mo agoWhat about durability? They are mechanical metal pieces, so would eventually wear down or change tone.
- inventor7777 6mo agoThis is a neat idea. Personally, I would not find it useful as they seem relatively fragile and if the receiver is not bulletproof and VERY sensitive then it could miss state changes. However, it would be interesting to see how it would work if you were able to have different ones on different frequencies with one main receiver. That would make a cost effective way to track cabinets, doors, etc in the same room.
- tomaskafka 6mo agoFinally, we are making the smart surveillance dust from the famous "Don't Make Smart Surveillance Dust" novel!
- tamimio 6mo agoGet an SDR, tune into the frequency, and troll the home automation system! Given that it’s not of a high frequency, the attack can be done from a distance with proper antenna, and the frequencies use a hardcoded algorithm. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see flipper zero addon to that (hardware through GPIO and software) for portability.
- Eduard 6mo agoSDR can't ultrasound
- tamimio 6mo agoYes it does, my LimeSDR can go to 100khz. If you need less, just get a piezoelectric transducer paired with signal generator like arduino or esp32, might add drive circuit/gate driver to improve it. It’s very doable, and you can programmatically troll the system knowing the algo, and I am saying “troll” but obviously you can have serious use of that.
- jacquesm 6mo agoSo, in the true spirit of the HN dismissive comment, but this time I think it really does have its place. Ultrasonic is DOA, sorry, but that just won't do. It's already a nuisance to have all these switching supplies that mess up your hearing (and some can be surprisingly loud), using it for power delivery is really a non-starter. There was a company that planned on using ultrasonic for power delivery to smart phones, every engineer with some ultrasonic experience said it wasn't going to work and they just kept going until they - predictably - went out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicEnergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicEnergy (formerly Ubeam). Just wishing it exists does not mean it is possible or practical, that's right up there with Theranos (and I think Theranos actually had a better chance of working even though that chance was extremely slim). There are interesting start-ups around the theme of energy scavenging though, that's a far more realistic but still extremely challenging proposition.
- JK-Swizzle 6mo agoDid you read the article? It was not about ultrasonic power delivery. I’d describe it more as tuned ultrasonic bells.
- jacquesm 6mo agoAhh I completely misunderstood the directional flow, thank you for the correction.
- robotresearcher 6mo agoYou may have misunderstood. Ultrasound is not being used here to deliver power to these 'sensors'. The devices give off distinctive ultrasound noises when they are bashed by things, like little cymbals. They are not really sensors - they transduce a mechanical input to a high-frequency mechanical output. To be used as a sensor you need a microphone and (typically) an AtoD as well. Since it's just a little signal, there's very little power in it, so while your pet might hear it, and maybe it'll cause your noise-canceling headphone to squawk, it's not going to have enough energy to hurt anything.
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoBought my house almost 3 years ago and put bunch of battery operated sensors, lights, switches. None of them died yet. None of the problems were due to batteries. Most common one - kiddo smashes it 5 times which kicks it into pairing mode...
- Eduard 6mo agorange of barely 3 meters, doesn't mesh, purely unidirectional, only applicable as a sensor for collision detection, still needs a powered microphone on the receiving side, most likely wears out. This isn't a smart home sensor.
- pshirshov 6mo agoSame for EnOcean (energy harvesting ones). But most of them are too expensive for wide adoption (€50 for a temperature+humidity sensor is bit too much).
- atmanactive 6mo agoTrue, but where EnOcean really shines is being able to slap a wall lightswitch anywhere in the house, with absolutely no wires whatsoever, and have it working flawlessly forever. Repeat as many times as needed. Incredible.
- ElijahLynn 6mo agoWhat a brilliant concept, useful for so many applications! The linked Instagram video was really useful and understanding the applications. I highly recommend watching that too. In addition to reading the article.