Reinventing the Clapper With a Knock-Based Home Automation Controller 92
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from Hack a Day: "Clap On! Clap Off! was super awesome when The Clapper came out in the mid-eighties. Now [Mathieu Stephan] is trying to make the concept much more functional. He put together a controller that lets you knock on walls to control things around the house. It's called the Toktoktok project and uses small boxes to receive user input and control items like lamps and computers." As the project website points out, Stephan is keeping the project intentionally open.
Just because you CAN do something (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are Americans really this lazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
You walk a couple meters to use a lightswitch? How fucking lazy are you? Active people like me go down to the breaker in the basement to turn the lights on and off, and then jog two laps around the house for good measure.
Word to the wise: laziness is not doing something potentially beneficial because you prefer to just sit around doing nothing. There is no gain from flipping a light switch, and therefore it's not lazy to find more convenient ways of doing it. You might as well bitch about people being too lazy to use a crank starter for their car.
Re:Are Americans really this lazy? (Score:4, Insightful)
75 year old wiring tends to be pretty good. Back then they were doing K&T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_and_tube_wiring [wikipedia.org] style. It looks scary as hell but it tends to be pretty safe - since your hot and neutral are separated by a considerable air gap and the wires are thermally insulated from the structure, an insulation failure (abrasion or overheating) usually doesn't burn the house down. It doesn't have modern safety features like a safety ground, but the actual wiring is fine.
The switch away from it has more to do with cost than safety. The guys installing it usually knew what they were doing and paid much better attention to detail than the average contractor dragging romex these days. It took a lot of time, but it was a reliable and safe system, and if it's installed, there's no reason to rip it out and replace it just because it's old.