paranormal

3 Articles

Bust Your Own Ghosts With A PKE Meter

June 7, 2020 by 17 Comments

You know, we wouldn’t be that surprised if aliens or ghosts show up for real before this year is out. If paranormal becomes part of the new normal, it might be nice to have a PKE meter that can detect spirits and help get a head start on figuring out what they want from us.

Yes, that’s right — instead of just lighting up whenever ghosts are near, [starscream205]’s meter goes the extra yard and translates spiritual energy into English words that scroll across the LED matrix. Inside is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a sense HAT, which takes spatial and environmental readings and assigns different words based on the results.

Now [starscream205] can go fearlessly into the night, guided by the night vision camera on the end, and watch for ghosts on the screen. Instead of a typical Pi-compatible screen, this is from a car back-up camera system and has been modified to work with the Pi.

We’ve seen a few PKE meters around here before, but they usually do things such as detect radiation. It’s nice to see one that’s faithful to the original purpose.

Teardown: Nihon Kenko Magnetic Wave Tester

April 15, 2019 by 35 Comments

You never know what kind of wonders you’ll find on eBay, especially when you have a bunch of alerts configured to go off when weird electronic devices pop up. You may even find yourself bidding on something despite not being entirely sure what it is. Perhaps you’re a collector of unusual gadgets, or maybe it’s because you’ve committed to doing monthly teardowns for the hacker blog you work for. In any event, you sometimes find yourself in possession of an oddball device that requires closer inspection.

Case in point, this “Magnetic Wave Tester” from everyone’s favorite purveyor of high-end electronics, Nihon Kenko Zoushin Kenkyukai Corporation. The eBay listing said the device came from an estate sale and the seller didn’t know much about it, but with just a visual inspection we can make some educated guesses. When a strong enough magnetic field is present, the top section on the device will presumably blink or light up. As it has no obvious method of sensitivity adjustment or even a display to show specific values, it appears the unit must operate like an electromagnetic canary in a coal mine: if it goes off, assume the worst.

If you’re wondering what the possible use for such a gadget is, you’re not the only one. I wasn’t able to find much information about this device online, but the few mentions I found didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. It seems two groups of people are interested in this type of “Magnetic Wave Tester”: people who believe strong magnetic fields have some homeopathic properties, or those who think it will allow them to converse with ghosts. In both cases, these aren’t the kind of users who want to see a microtesla readout; they want a bright blinking light to show their friends.

So without further ado, let’s align our chakras, consult with the spirits, and see what your money gets you when you purchase a pocket-sized hokum detector.

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Listen To The Netherworld With Artificial Intelligence

October 24, 2017 by 19 Comments

It’s that time of year again, and with Halloween arguably being the hacker’s perfect holiday, we’re starting to see a tick up in projects with a spooky theme. Most seem to do with making some otherwise tame Halloween decorations scarily awesome, but this is different — using artificial intelligence to search for ghosts.

It seems like [Matt Reed]’s “DeepWhisper” project is meant to be taken as light-hearted fun for the spooky season, but there may be a touch of seriousness to his efforts to listen in on ghostly conversations. The principle behind this is electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby the metabolically and/or dimensionally challenged are purported to influence electronic systems, resulting in heavily processed audio clips that seem to have a whispered endearment from the departed or a threat from a malevolent spirit. DeepWhisper takes this a step further by using a Raspberry Pi to feed audio into the Google Cloud Speech API for analysis. If anything is whispered in one of the 110 or so languages Google knows, it’ll get displayed on a screen. [Matt] plans to set DeepWhisper up in the aptly-named Butchertown section of Nashville and live-stream the results next week.

It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s neural network makes out of the random noise it will probably only ever hear. And [Matt] is planning on releasing his code for all to see, so there may be some valuable cloud techniques to learn from DeepWhisper. But in the unlikely event that he does discover ghosts, it’s nice to know you can have the tools and the talent to bust ’em.

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