Creating a Smart Home Device to Annoy Your Neighbors

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From Quantum Bit

In the dead of night, when your neighbors are arguing, partying, or children are crying, how do you deal with it?

Knock on the door? Use earplugs? Silently endure until you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown?

A foreign guy was driven to migraine by the noise from upstairs, so he created a “weapon” to retaliate.

Creating a Smart Home Device to Annoy Your Neighbors

This “weapon” sticks to the ceiling, and when the upstairs starts to “act up”, the guy gives a command, and the “weapon” starts to “pound” the ceiling.

The neighbors hear it and immediately stop disturbing the peace, even opening their computers to start emailing the landlord…

Connecting Home Assistant via MQTT Protocol

Of course, it can also deal with neighbors on the left and right by sticking it to the wall to “attack” them.

This “weapon” is called TallyWhacker, a smart home device.

The guy developed it using Arduino and ESP8266 (a microcontroller with WiFi capabilities), connecting the ESP8266 to WiFi, and communicating with Google Assistant (Google Assistant) to achieve voice activation functionality.

You can buy the ESP8266 for just over 10 yuan on Taobao (Arduino programming code part is at the end of the article).

It requires configuring the MQTT protocol (an IoT messaging transport protocol based on the publish/subscribe model) to connect to Home Assistant for control, turning it into a smart home.

Home Assistant is an open-source smart home system based on Python, which introduced Google Assistant starting from version 0.56.

By using Home Assistant cloud services, you can connect your Home Assistant instance to Google Assistant.

This instance appears on Google Home, and you can finally use voice commands to turn TallyWhacker on/off.

You can also connect the ESP8266 microcontroller to Home Assistant using ESPHome, though the configuration process seems a bit complicated, so it wasn’t used.

Once everything is set up, with a command “Hey Google, turn on TallyWhacker”, the white lever switch connected to a DC servo starts swinging quickly, making noise.

The duration of the noise varies, randomly controlled between 5-30 seconds. When the neighbors stop making noise, you can also stop it.

It has a relay inserted, which drives the motor by powering it.

Of course, the guy also gave it a 3D printed shell.

Foreign Version of “Earthquake Device”?

Perhaps at first glance, you might think: isn’t this just the domestic “Earthquake Device”?

The domestic “Earthquake Device” is indeed very loud, “effectively outstanding”, usually equipped with a vibration motor that utilizes the principle of electromagnetic repulsion, causing the internal iron block to push back and forth repeatedly.

Once the motor is activated, it causes the floor above to vibrate at high frequencies, resonating with the furniture below, creating noise that sounds like a hammer drill, while the sound you hear at home is very low.

However, using this thing could easily violate the Public Security Administration Punishment Law of the People’s Republic of China, so be cautious!

In contrast, the noise from the DIY device is much smaller, to the point where some are curious if the upstairs neighbors really heard the noise it made, and the guy replied: No.

However, many people have expressed that this invention is quite good, as there has never been such a thing as an “Earthquake Device” in their market!

So someone is willing to be the first to support this product on Kickstarter.

Regarding the issue of low noise, the guy is also considering adding a couple of larger vibration motors.

Improvements can also be made to the shell to add resonance effects.

TallyHacker’s Arduino programming implementation:

https://pastebin.com/ED0JtMsZ

Google Home Assistant MQTT configuration:

https://pastebin.com/9b22YBzZ

References: [1]https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/06/06/hey-google-piss-off-the-neighbors/[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/nrmh9h/introducing_my_tallywhacker_a_new_smart_home/