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One of my biggest problems at night is if I don't fall asleep early enough, I start to hear this strong, low pitched growls and moans from the wall, it starts off at about the sound of a fully loaded audio car passing by with full bass. Then the noise begins to climb into the 60db range, varies from about 5hz to 400hz (note: figures are estimated and may be off). The noise is not constant, but varied in an on and off motion and osscilates about every 5 seconds and lasts about 2.5 seconds. it registers 8.5 on the richster scale, sometimes hits 9.0 and beyond, and pictures on the wall shake, and the cat is afraid, very afraid.

This noise is my dad's snoring. There's the pre-snore phase which is like a low pitch mumbling, this is usually covered up with the fans and hardly heard, this is a warning that the full snore phase is about to begin and I usually turn on the desk fan to solve it. Sometimes I have to put a paper behind it to cause turbulance for extra white noise.

But the ultimate way is to wake him up which gives me 5 to 30 minutes to fall asleep, usually not enough time so it has to be done multiple times. Main issue is this causes me to have to get up from my bed and knock in the wall, and if the cat is sleeping on me, I have to disturb her.

So I had all sorts of ideas, ranging from having a spring solonoid hitting the wall when I hit a switch, to simply a long stick, but all these methods were rather inconvinient or inefficient, and prone to failure at the worse time, due to moving parts.

When I had the internet installed up here, the guy left behind his ethernet cables, since it was old stretched ones of no quality for other customers. But I kept it in case I ever want to use it anyway.

Then it occured to me: I can cut it up and have decent copper wire to work with, 4 coper pairs at that.

Then later on while shopping at radioshack I saw an alarm that runs on 12 volts. And suddently it all came together.

Wire up an alarm in his room, that can be activated from mine. Brilliant! I thought, so I started stripping the ethernet cables...




Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3296, old post ID:26726

That's a neat way to strip ethernet cable, all you do is pull on the white "string" inside and it will cut up the wire. You kind of have to wrap it around your hand first and it's sort of like pulling a fishing line, so got to be careful not to get cut but it went smooth for me.

And here's the result of the stripped cables.




Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3296, old post ID:26727

I had measured in advanced and needed 15M exact of wireing, and don't ask how this happened but when I stripped the wires and measured 1 pair and multiplied by 4, it came up EXACTLY to 15M. Go figure. So I presoldered them together and started tucking it under the baseboards... I felt naughty at this point.

I should of took more pics but did not plan on making an article style thread on it.

The siren I got runs on 6-14 volts and is 102db, much louder then I wanted but I just have to hit the button for less then a second and he'll wake up good from his snoring. Not sure how many times I'll be able to use this though, before he finds out and gets pissed at me. It's a risky setup but should work. I'll be running it on 6 volts so with the resistance of the wireing the sound is actually not that bad.

Only problem is I forgot to buy the switch for it, so I'll have to go back some time to get a momentary push button. Might even make it more complex and have a capacitor. Turn the switch 1 way to charge it, the other way to activate the siren from the capacitor, that way it will be forced to last a short time. Basically a controlled delay.




Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3296, old post ID:26728

Haha, you're mean, Red.

Very cool, though.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3296, old post ID:26729

lol yeah, a little extreme but I have to sleep too. hopefully I won't have to use it too often though.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3296, old post ID:26730