5 ms·
I'm glad people are realizing that radio waves aren't the only ways to send signals around a room. I really want someone to make a wireless, powerless keyboard
by brownbat 13y ago
I'm glad people are realizing that radio waves aren't the only ways to send signals around a room.
I really want someone to make a wireless, powerless keyboard where every key's click is tuned to a slightly different sound.
Keylogging by acoustic emanations is a well researched technique, I just think it could be a feature if we made the keyboard right.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_tex.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_t...
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoUntil you get crumbs under the keys... EDIT: "a wireless, powerless keyboard where every key's click is tuned to a slightly different sound" hang on, like a piano?
- brownbat 13y ago> hang on, like a piano Starbucks is about to get a lot noisier. :)
- namecast 13y agoHeh, I just visualized my laptop keyboard transposed onto an 88 key piano, and then tried to imagine what a typical vim session would sound like on it...
- tmp123415 13y agoThis must be done.
- nitrogen 13y agoMany MIDI virtual keyboard apps provide a mapping to the PC keyboard. Install one of those, (e.g. apt-get install vkeybd), plus a softsynth (e.g. ZynAddSubFX). Done.
- e12e 13y agoObviously Emacs sessions would sound better, as Emacs already is set up to use chords...
- thirdsight 13y agoFunny :) As long as you hit middle C1 on every chord regardless of whether or not it's a duff chord or not... At least with vi, you can play one fingered and make an acceptable tune ;) Sure Douglas Hofstadter could write a book about that...
- TheCraiggers 13y agoI think tones in our hearing range would be a bad idea. From what I remember of my music theory class, our brains (through either nature or nurture) don't like discordant sounds like that for a long time. In fact, I believe it's been used as a torture device in the past, although I'm guessing it wasn't just a weird jumble of notes in that case. I don't think I'd be very good at programming in any case.
- im3w1l 13y agoClick noises have no real tone character so could probably work. My keyboard already makes those anyway.
- TheCraiggers 13y agoTrue, but as you alluded to yourself, those aren't really 'tones'. The parent was talking about a keyboard that sounded like a piano.
- slowmover 13y agoInterestingly, some early wireless TV remotes used sound this way. The battery-free remotes would strike a tone when a button was pressed, and carefully tuned forks in the TV set would resonate in response, triggering the remote function. http://www.tvhistory.tv/1957_Zentih_Ad-Remote1.JPG http://www.tvhistory.tv/1957_Zentih_Ad-Remote1.JPG
- jared314 13y agoThere are also reasons they stopped using it in the first place[1]: Some problems with this method were that the receiver could be triggered accidentally by naturally occurring noises, and some people could hear the piercing ultrasonic signals. There was an incident in which a toy xylophone changed the channels on such sets because some of the overtones from the xylophone matched the remote's ultrasonic frequency. While each specific problem could be worked around with modern methods, it looks like a technique reserved for situations where you don't have a better option. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control#Television_remote_controls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control#Television_remot...
- Torgo 13y agoI don't see why DTMF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign... couldn't have solved this pretty easily without adding too much complexity. I've seen those remotes before and they usually only had about three buttons on them. Still pointless, but I think this would have worked.
- chrissnell 13y agoWe had a tv like this growing up. Whenever the dog would run through the room, his tags would jingle and change the channel. It was funny, too, because the tv channel changer was this rotary dial that was motorized. When you changed the channel, the little dial on the tv would click and spin around.
- STRML 13y agoWould be great, until you had more than one in a room - what a mess that would be.
- samolang 13y agoAre there limitations on the number of possible sounds? If not, each keyboard could use a unique set of sounds.
- dsl 13y agoThere is no limit on the number of sounds if you want every keyboard to cost as much as a handmade finely tuned professional musical instrument.
- sliverstorm 13y agoNo, but the more sounds you use, the more precise everything has to be. Just think of a machine that recognizes blue, red, and yellow as compared to a machine that recognizes all 24-bit colors. Aside from everything else, how on earth would you calibrate the sensor?
- samolang 13y agoYou could do something like keep the frequency offset between keys constant for all keyboards, but add some way of shifting the frequency of all of the keys by the same amount. It seems feasible to me, but I have no expertise in the area. The difficulty could prohibit an infinite set of configurations, but it could easily allow for a small set of configurations for cases when a few keyboards are in close proximity.
- VLM 13y agoIt would be trivial to use the same synth hardware and warp the oscillator that drives the overall synth by a couple ppm higher or lower. It would be a lot easier to encode at the message layer. You are all talking around a FDMA spread spectrum implementation and I'm saying a CDMA would be a lot simpler to implement...