First screen, captured 3 days ago. Open the video.

Locating the source of a mysterious beep

What HN thinks

A dying carbon monoxide detector meets a five-microphone AI array, and the boxes remain unpacked.

Delight and beep war stories
Many shared their own hunts for dead smoke alarms, including a stereo-headphone phase-shift trick, and enjoyed the project as a fun weekend hack.
Just search the boxes
Skeptics joked about binary-searching boxes, timing the beeps, or simply unpacking, arguing the AI system was overkill compared with manual searching.
AI erodes learning and satisfaction
Some worried that outsourcing thinking to agents removes the struggle and learning, and criticised AI-written problem docs at work; the author countered that he learned things he otherwise never would have.

Consensus: Most agree dying-battery beeps are maddeningly hard to locate, partly because pure tones lack the overtones that help ears localise sound. Whether an AI-built locator was worth it remains split.

Recommended in the comments

FOTRIC TD2e (product): Owners said it locates sounds and air leaks like magic, and it can be rented or bought used for less.
miniDSP UMA-16 ↗ (product): Suggested as a cheap DIY route to an acoustic camera.
Audacity (tool): Used to record two improvised mics and read the phase shift that pointed to a hidden smoke alarm.
librosa (library): A commenter had an LLM use it for frequency analysis to detect a specific spoken word.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 3 days ago.

Points: 302
Comments: 155
Best rank: #5
Posted: 2026-11-10 by bigwheels
Category: AI & ML

claude-code acoustic-localization webaudio websockets python coding-agents llms

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