Just Put Your Lips Together To Turn On A Lamp

whistler-lamp-control

The inlaid image is a controller board which [Limpkin] developed to add whistle control as a home automation option. It has an effective range of around fifteen feet and does a good job of detecting whistles from many different people. Here is one of the test subjects (captured with a hidden camera) whistling to the white LED lamp in order to switch it on.

The board is quite small. [Limpkin] holds it up in the beginning of his test video, which gives a good sense of scale. One end has a barrel jack through which the board gets power. The other end has a two conductor screw terminal which is used for switch your devices. An N-channel MOSFET protects the circuit when a heavy external load is connected. It is capable of driving a respectable 90 watts. If you’re looking to switch mains rated devices you’ll need to bring your own relay to the party.

Audio processing is handled by the Freescale ARM Cortex M4 chip at the center of the board. The Serial Wire Debug (SWD) clock and data pins are both broken out to solder pads so the thing is hackable. [Limpkin] posted the schematic, gerbers, and a code template. But he didn’t release the algorithms he uses for processing so if you want to make this at home you’ll need to figure that out for yourself. If you need help you should check out this whistle-based remote control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxAMKNphw

14 thoughts on “Just Put Your Lips Together To Turn On A Lamp

  1. Hey everyone!

    A few words about the algorithm: on my website the general layout of the algorithm is described. If you look at the comments at the end of the page, you’ll see why you can make a better algorithm (as it doesn’t need to be so adaptable as mine).
    There’s also a great comment from James explaining another way to do whistle recognition, which seems to work also perfectly.
    And FYI we also managed to make it work from 30 feet!

    Let me know if you have any question,
    limpkin

  2. Easy enough to do this with an analog circuit: just have a mic at one end, then an amplifier, then a band-pass filter at whatever frequency you want to whistle at, then a buffer. Use the signal from that to switch a MOSFET and turn the light on.

  3. yeah gave it 5 minutes of thought and I think it won’t be anything that beats normal speech recognition. a song can be captured in one word and it’s simply easier for most people as they have limited musical memory.

    Just with the 3 words and a number -> “light on/off” I could control millions of lights for example.

  4. I bought one of these and use it with a relay on my living room floor lamp. It’s fun! I can turn it on and off with a couple of notes on the piano, or by whistling. I have to whistle kinda loud since the room is large… every once in a while something on TV or a loud laugh will flip the light off… but that’s fun too. Two thumbs up!

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