Small Dongle Brings the HDD Clicking Back To SSDs In Retro PCs (hackaday.com) 117
Longtime Slashdot reader root_42 writes: Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One "problem" with retro computing is that we replace those disks with compact flash, SD cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances, which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It's called the HDD Clicker and it's a very unique little gadget. "An ATtiny and a few support components ride on a small PCB along with a piezoelectric speaker," describes Hackaday. "The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of clicks from the speaker that sound remarkably like a hard drive heading seeking tracks."
A demo of the device can be viewed at 7:09, with a full defragmentation at 13:11.
A demo of the device can be viewed at 7:09, with a full defragmentation at 13:11.
Why not go for the sound of a floppy drive? (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't have a HDD in my first computer like this young hipster did. =/
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Re:Why not go for the sound of a floppy drive? (Score:5, Funny)
Can't they also create the clicking sounds after which the hard drive irrevocably crashed?
It's called the Seagate package and it costs an extra $5.00.
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If we spend an extra $15 for the premium version, can we get bad bearing whine, too?
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Back in the day we loaded our games from cassette tapes, but after it finished loading you would stop the tape player (or it would stop itself when it reached the end of the tape), so there wasn't any sound from the hardware to tell you whether it had crashed or not. If it wasn't responding to input, it had crashed.
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In the early modems that worked acoustically by being connected to phone it was the actual sound of handshake and other stuff would produce, because it had to happen in the audible range the phones were designed to work with. But there was no good *reason other than giving the user some audible signals, for the purpose of "monitoring", to produce any n
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Synthetically producing the sound is what all the later modems that worked all electronically over the phone connection did anyway, if I remember correctly.
In the early modems that worked acoustically by being connected to phone it was the actual sound of handshake and other stuff would produce, because it had to happen in the audible range the phones were designed to work with. But there was no good *reason other than giving the user some audible signals, for the purpose of "monitoring", to produce any noise after it could be done electronically. If I remember correctly, on many of the later models you could turn the sound 'off'.
Plain, non-digital telephone lines were clipped to the audible range. Modems had to produce signals at frequencies humans could hear, because the analog filters on the switches would filter everything else out as "noise". Almost every modem up to 56.6kbps that you used was just tapping that signal and piping it through a $0.50 speaker to play the handshake. Maybe some of the crappy Windows "soft modems" would take that signal, digitize it, and present it as a windows audio source instead of having a hard
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So let me ask a question: Is it the "synthetically" word that I may be using differently than what people expect?
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I guess so yeah. If by "synthetic", you mean "generated as a digital signal and run through a DAC", then your old 300bps external modem with the acoustic coupler worked identically to the last generation USR 56.6k with a 16650A UART. The only difference between the old acoustically coupled modem and the modern modem is that on the modern modem, the DAC outputs directly to the phone line and you can control the amplifier+speaker with some AT commands.
With either one, the sound you hear is the exact signal
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I'll use the "synthetic" more carefully in the future though because when reading between the lines I made it sound like the modem noises where "completely made up with no relation to anything".
My general point was more along the lines that the sound which all the non acoustic coupled modems produced served no other practical purpose than being auditory cues for the user. And while of course you can't just use an op amp between a speaker and the signal output/input in ADSL modems or WiFi to pr
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What you said is correct, to the point that the last generation analog modems still had the capability to drop their signaling to the 300bps rate of those ancient first-gen acoustical-coupler equipped modems. That's what all the noise was about - the two modems on either side of the line figuring out what each unit was capable of, and setting up a connection using the best available common standard including data rate, error correction, data compression, etc.
Once the negotiation was complete, the default s
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In the early modems that worked acoustically by being connected to phone ...
I actually used those in high school, attached to a teletype with a punch tape reader.
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Analog modems could only use frequency ranges that were available through telephone line filters, nominally the audible human range with extreme high and low cut off. This is why modems were bound to a maximum of 56,000 BPS with the 56KFlex and V.90 standards - there was no more frequency to be used reliably. Also, you could very easily verify it was audible analog signalling if someone was using their modem on the telephone line, and you picked up another phone on the same pair - your ear was blasted off
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I used to do dialup tech support in the '99-2002 era. I could tell you what speed the modem connected at just by the handshake sound, as well as whether it was X.2, K56flex, or V.90 based on which 56k tones it connected at. As well as diagnose plenty of phone line problems along with it - like if it got stuck in a loop of rehandshaking over and over and either never connected or connected at some very low speed, you had phone line problems. Could be as simple as a crappy phone cord from the wall to modem, c
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I was just about to post something similar, from my experience 20+ years ago supporting Supra / Diamond modems. If you had been doing it long enough, you could pick out various segments of the handshake noise and be able to know what protocol is being negotiated - speed, error correction, etc.
My favorite issue from customers: "I replaced my 28.8k modem with this 56k modem but still only ever connect at 26,400!" Answer: your phone line very likely has an inline concentrator on it that reduces your availabl
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I've just been told that they actually did produce some audible noise for the startup sequence which then used to be synthetically replicated by electronic modems to give the users indicators of what's going on.
By the time internet became widespread around here I quickly switched
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I remember an old Beagle Bros program for the Apple ][ that could play the Jaws theme by spinning/seeking dual disk drives.
Re:Why not go for the sound of a floppy drive? (Score:4, Insightful)
"A Bicycle Built for Two" on the Commodore 1541 floppy drive. The program was obviously written by someone who did drive alignments for a living.
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"A Bicycle Built for Two" on the Commodore 1541 floppy drive.
I had one that played the Doctor Who on my old 1541. Unfortunately I was so impressed by it, and showed it to so many people, that I eventually popped the drive out of alignment. Fortunately it was during the height of the C64 so there were still dedicated Commodore service shops in town, but now I'd scared of running it too often since I'm not really all that mechanically included [I broke a drive trying to cut the traces which turned it from drive 8 to drive 9].
That said gotta give it to Commodore, for
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Better yet go back farther with the PDP8. From what I read somone figured out you could get away with playing music though a radio because of the unshielded nature of the PDP8 and alo because the shear amount of current was enough to push even a crystal radio. Ah the times before FCC rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akvSE5Z474c
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The Floppotron [silent.org.pl].
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Then maybe I can add something to my laser printer that makes it sound like a dot matrix?
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You'll love this then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Floppy sound, for real (Score:4, Informative)
Why not got for the sound of a floppy drive?
"Both ways up hill in the snow"-jokes aside, this REALY exist.
Both in USB emulator such as FloppyFlash firmware for GoTek [github.com] and for full blown cycle exact Commodore 1541 emulators like Pi1541 [firebaseapp.com] (not merely speaking the same serial protocol, but even able to run custom code similar as the 6502 in the real drive ; come to think off, the 1541 with onboard CPU was closer to our modern concept of NAS).
One of the purpose (beside simple nostaligia and search for retro-authentism) is that there are games and scene demos that actually use the drive's noise as an extra percussion channel for the music.
(The most extreme example thereof being the Freespin demo, that runs entirely inside the 1541 on its 6502 [youtu.be], so obviously there is not even an attached Comodore 64/128 to rely upon for the music).
And of course, if we're going to speak about stepper noise being used for music, obviously we cannot forget to mention the mighty/insane Floppotron [silent.org.pl].
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Floppotron for the win! Now on version 2.0. The music created by that contraption is oftentimes better than the original. My fav. YT channel.
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Actually, version 3.0 [youtu.be] was released a couple months back. Now 100 floppy drives, four flatbeds, and 16 3.5" HDDs for percussion.
Cassette Loading Noise (Score:3)
I didn't have a HDD in my first computer like this young hipster
That's ok, I didn't have a floppy drive in my first computer - you loaded programs from cassette tape while the computer (BBC Model B) made a periodic noise like a really slow dialup modem (the cassette was only 1200 baud!) as each block was loaded. Fun times!
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Some here on my Commodore VIC20, I had to load a lot of games in two parts. The first part was a bunch of DATA statements and POKES to overwrite the character map data. But this left no room for game code, so you would NEW the program code, and load the second half of the program off tape which had the actual game code which would use those modified bitmaps in character memory to draw the sprites.
...and to fix the car problem (Score:2)
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Re:...and to fix the car problem (Score:4, Funny)
Reminds me of the recent presentation [youtube.com] of the Dodge Charger Daytona SRT electric "muscle car." They've included a (patent pending) "Fratzonic" sound system to generate 126 dB [youtu.be] of fake engine noise. The presented even boasts about waking up the neighbors.
Other people may have other reactions, but to me the whole thing just screams "I have a tiny penis!"
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"I have a tiny penis!" -- necro81 / Sept 28th, 2022
...ahh dammit now I can be quoted out of context too.
Re:...and to fix the car problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Hadn't seen that, that's an even crazier example of the things I've seen. A lot of cars are using fake/tuned/modified engine sounds these days though. Some are piping it through the radio speakers, some like my FR-S have a tube that runs from the intake to the cabin passenger floor area to increase engine rumble in the car. A lot of folks (me included) block off or remove that tube entirely because we don't want more noise in the car.
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I do not disagree that having some sound is useful for others to be able to hear the car coming. (Although, pedantically, deaf people probably wouldn't hear it no matter what.) But there is a big difference between a modest acoustic signature that you can hear several seconds out (when coming along at, say, 30 mph), and this grotesque example of "Look at me! I'M SO LOUD! Isn't it cool!?"
This is the equiva
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I vote neigh on this one.
Modern torture device (Score:5, Funny)
The sound of a parking hard drive head was the most annoying sound imaginable. Persistent, unpredictable, frustrating and unavoidable. The use of this gadget should be deemed as violating human rights and the Hague Conventions on war crimes. I wouldn't buy it for anyone... except my mother in law.
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most annoying sound imaginable. Persistent, unpredictable, frustrating and unavoidable
I wonder ..was it of female gender?
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Uffff... You like seeing the world burn, don't you? Get ready, they're coming for you...
CF/SSD sound (Score:2)
Pretty Cool (Score:2)
I've thought for a while about making a Raspberry Pi case with something like this, though I'm not sure this kind of setup does a good job of replicating the sound of a hard drive in a desktop PC so much as in a laptop. At least the ones I've used sounded more "tappy" than "clicky."
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I mean, seems like with a slightly more complicated device you could have it make ANY sound during HDD activity. Limiting it to clicks seems lacking in imagination.
I think there might be something marvellously apt about a long series of farting noises as Windows ME starts up.
Install one of these in a friend's computer and make it squeak like a dog toy every time there's an HDD access.
Add a counter, make it Wilhelm scream every 100 flashes or so.
The possibilities are endless.
Interesting! (Score:2)
I'll buy one and put it next to my DVD rewinder [fandom.com]
How about the lights? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light..."
The argument is that now you can tell if the computer has crashed, but if it works by tapping into the hard drive activity light why not just look at the light to determine if the computer has crashed?
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True, didn't think of that! :-D However my 486 is under the desk and usually out of reach. The audible feedback is simply faster and adds to the "feel". Just like hearing the RPM on you car gives you an immediate audible feedback. Don't take this gadget too seriously! But it's a cute addition to every retro PC setup!
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Only if you have a narrow view of what "retro PC" means. I think my fifth computer was the first one to have a hard drive.
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Here's my list of early computers
TRS 80 - cassette
Compucolor II 5.25" floppy (51.2k capacity)
Apple ][ + 5,25 " floppies
C=64 5.25 " floppy (1541)
Macintosh 312K (3.5" floppy (400K capacity
Ami9ga 1000 3.5" floppies (880K capacity
Amiga A2000 20MB MFM Hard drive on 2090 controller -but you had to boot from a floppy
Re:How about the lights? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would like a hard disk activity light back on my laptop as well. Bothers me that I can't tell when the disk is active. Don't care if it's an SSD and it's supposedly very fast, if you're dealing with 50GByte files, you want to know the system is still active. And starting task manager or top isn't as quick as seeing a light flicker...
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Frankly that's all I want, visual indicators. I don't need the sounds of a mechanical device struggling, but it would be nice to know if I've actually managed to consume all RAM and am now swapping to disk, as opposed to programs or the OS having problems.
Unfortunately to do it right, we'd probably need an LED that could be turned off with a hardware switch, so that we don't have to see it if we don't want, but could if we do. Think of those mode buttons on Cisco Catalyst products that toggle the port LED
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Macs are worse. No physical light at all. I could never tell if the drive is doing anything when computer is frozen or whatever.
My SSD RAID has activity lights (Score:2)
Re:How about the lights? (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of modern cases don't have HDD activity lights, and sometimes people keep them under the desk or somewhere else they can't easily be seen.
I have a laptop from work with a mechanical HDD, it's that old. Doesn't get much, but I find the HDD sound basically useless for any kind of diagnostic purposes. Windows is always thrashing away at the drive for some reason, usually unrelated to anything I'm doing. It's not like back in the Amiga and DOS days when HDD activity was almost always initiated by the user.
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Seriously? (Score:1)
If the problem is "sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working..." there's a better solution: Install Linux.
Re: Seriously? (Score:2)
Youngins probably have never used iostat, in their diapers and everything.
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yea linux works great on a XT class machine
How about a v90 modem? (Score:2)
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Here you go! https://soundbible.com/tags-modem.html [soundbible.com]
non-computer devices have had this for years (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a large section of the population that just doesn't believe that a 'quiet' machine can be as powerful as a loud one.
We could have had quieter leaf blowers, lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, for decades now.
But instead, manufacturers are installing artificial noise generators into the damn things to intentionally make them ear-damaging loud, just because the quiet ones weren't selling no matter how much evidence was provided to show they were just as capable as the older loud ones.
People are stupid.
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I've heard they're trying to make electric Harley Davidsons sound like the Bat-mobile. I'm sure they'll find a way to bring that technology to lawnmowers & leaf-blowers. It's the American way.
Seeking sound of floppy disks? (Score:2)
How about a dongle to reproduce the seeking sounds of floppy drives? When floppies were the primary disk storage, was before computers ran background tasks, The sound was very informative: You could tell what your program was doing, by the sound of the disks.
I suppose you could go back to the days of blinkenlights [slackware.com], but that's even before my time...
As soon as operating systems starting running zillions of background tasks, disk noises became pretty meaningless. About the only thing hard disk sounds tell
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useless noise (Score:2)
>"Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances"
Under any circumstances, not "usual" circumstances.
I still fail to understand why people would WANT stupid noise. I wouldn't want it in an electric car, or in a computer. What is next? Invention of a solid state frig and we have to make grinding and whirring noises for that? Personally, I want a quieter world.
>"which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if
Is there an external activity light module? (Score:2)
As AmiMoJo pointed out earlier [slashdot.org], not everyone wants to have to scoot back and crouch to look at the lights on the tower under the desk. Do desktop PC case makers offer an external activity light module that can be run out of the case and attached to the display?
Not good enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Making random noises when the HDD is being accessed is not good enough. I want to hear the proper sounds correlating to the virtual head seeks to access fragmented data spread far across the medium.
I do remember on the floppy disk days on my Amiga, you would often get a near-miraculous speedup when you defragmented a floppy disk. Nothing like hearing nothing but the whirling of the spindle as the head smoothly read contiguous data off the disk.
what i miss the most is (Score:2)
No Thankyou (Score:2)
crashed??? (Score:2)
Haha it's thinking (Score:1)
Mmmmm, crunchy. (Score:2)
I keep old (like, quantum fireball old), dead but spinning PATA disks for just this reason, except I use an ATtiny to drive the voice coils of the head actuator directly. Still get the satisfying spin up and seeking noises, have them in 5 of my old beige boxes. Maybe I should have made a video too.
Keep the HD sounds (Score:2)
Why clicking? (Score:1)
Clicking (Score:2)
Am I the only one that remembers that hard drives clicking is BAD? Yeah, there's a bit of noise from seeking, and hybrid drives were a bit clumsily loud, but, on any day I'd prefer NO SOUND from a HDD than a click-of-death.
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I agree, in fact I thought the rationale of why a person would buy a device like this was a little silly as explained. I figured if there were a market for a device like this, it would be to use newer hardware, and hopefully retain a little nostalgia if say, building a retro inspired PC. Though I would also expect it to artificially throttle the speed to simulate something more "oldie-time".
But anyways, not sure I'd allow somebody who uses the sound of a dying hard drive as a primary indicator of a proble
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Though I would also expect it to artificially throttle the speed to simulate something more "oldie-time".
Ahhhhh the days before any type of protective runtime. Submit my CS homework from my 486 sx 33, the teacher runs it, in front of the class, on a Pentium.
not sure I'd allow somebody who uses the sound of a dying hard drive as a primary indicator of a problem, watch my children for any length of time. =)
Wow, you ARE forgetting the old days. "Why, is that bad?" - Everyone's parent (why would BOTH parents use a computer?) at some point in your early life.
Re: Clicking (Score:2)
What!?
I meant using noise of a hard drive (or lack of) as an indication of the computer locking up, might be comparible to the kids inexplicably stop crying or screaming as a reason to go check up on them. :)
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I meant using noise of a hard drive (or lack of) as an indication of the computer locking up, might be comparible to the kids inexplicably stop crying or screaming as a reason to go check up on them. :)
Reading is fundamental, yet soooo hard hehehe
Now that you mention it, there *IS* that silence . . .
This idea is ridiculous (Score:2)
So just as with vinyl records, hipsters will love it. Not content with a dongle, they ill want to see it built into their next laptop. Sound libraries will be available to simulate different brands of rotating disk. There will be some latency built into every SSD access, to simulate hard disk lag.
Next up: (Score:2)
Replicating the buzzing noise that the flyback transformer in your CRT made!
stupid question (Score:2)
If you made a super-kewl retro Pentium 60 machine why wouldn't you have just PUT A HDD into it? They're astonishingly cheap. Hell, I'm certain I have some 2-4gig IDE HDDs lying in a drawer around here, you can have them.
LEDs? (Score:2)
I would be happy to just have an LED showing disk activity. The idiots at Dell decided this feature was not needed in my $3000 laptop.
Fun, but needs larger speaker (Score:2)
Bearing noise (Score:2)
Can it up modded to also produce that irritating buzzy bearing noise that was harmless so it lasted for years?
Bring back the flashing light! (Score:3)
Way back in the 80s (I'm old) I had a software company. One user complained that every bill he printed caused the red light on the HDD to flash 7 times. He was worried about wearing out the light.
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Way back in the 80s (I'm just as old) I worked at a large company making cellular phone switches. Infrastructure gear, the stuff on the back end that routes your calls. The switch had a big panel of LEDs, one for each voice channel in the system, which lit up when in use. It also had a "lamp test" button, a hold
Remember? (Score:2)
Spinning disks are not really of the past at all.
Free alternative solutions (Score:3)
Press the CAPS LOCK key. If the light doesn't toggle then your computer is probably frozen.
Move your mouse. If the pointer doesn't move then your computer is probably frozen.
I like my computers dead silent. No need to waste money to make them (even more) annoying.
What's next? An US Robitics modem sound [youtube.com] when you connect to a web page?
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Activity Indicator (Score:2)
A number of people have commented here that they miss having a disk indicator LED. For Windows users, there is a nice little utility called Activity Indicator [sourceforge.net] that puts a small flashing icon in your System Tray. It's configurable and fairly unobtrusive.
This is how dumb the sofware obsessed are... (Score:2)
First of all, I like this. However, this goes to show how you code jockey's can be such morons...thinking every little thing can only be solved with code. He's taking a pulse from the LED, and then making another pulse to drive a piezo...but rather than just using a 555 to do it...he's using a full blown microcontroller, and code to do so. It could have been the most basic, of basic 555 timer circuits.
I don't give a shit about your argument regarding microcontrollers being soooo cheap...
Disappointing, just clicks when the LED changes (Score:2)
Disappointing, just clicks when the LED changes state.
That's now how hard drives work, but you do you.
click of death (Score:2)
Sure! Why not? (Score:2)
Not that much different than putting a 4 inch tip on a one inch Honda tailpipe. Probably a consumer crossover there.