The Clapper

3 Articles

The Screamer Is Just Like The Clapper But Even More Annoying

May 16, 2025 by 11 Comments

Remember The Clapper? It was a home automation tool (of sorts) that let you turn appliances on and off by clapping. [Kevin O’Connor] has built something rather similar, if more terrifying. It’s called The Screamer.

The build is based around a Sonoff S31 smart switch. [Kevin] selected an off-the-shelf device because he wanted something that was safe to use with mains power out of the box. But specifically, he selected the S31 because it has an ESP8266 inside that’s easy to reprogram with the aid of ESPHome. He ended up hooking up a whole extra ESP32 with an INMP441 microphone over I2S to do the scream detection. This was achieved with a simple algorithm that looked for high amplitude noises with lots of energy in the 1000 – 4000 Hz frequency range. When a scream is detected, it flips a GPIO pin which is detected by the S31, which then toggles the state of the smart switch in turn. Job done.

It’s a simple project that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s The Screamer! If you’d like to learn more about the original Clapper that inspired this build, we’ve looked at that before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own excuses to scream at the lights and walls in your home, please only notify the tipsline if it has something vaguely to do with electronics or hackery.

Clap On! A Breadboard

December 9, 2014 by 11 Comments

The Clapper™ is a miracle of the 1980s, turning lights and TVs on and off with the simple clap of the hands, and engraving itself into the collective human unconsciousness with a little jingle that implores – nay, commands – you to Clap On! and Clap Off! [Rutuvij] and [Ayush] bought a clap switch kit, but like so many kits, this one was impossible to understand; building the circuit was out of the question, let alone understanding the circuit. To help [Rutuvij] and [Ayush] out, [Rafale] made his own version of the circuit, and figured out a way to explain how the circuit works.

While not the most important component, the most obvious component inside a Clapper is a microphone. [Rafale] is using a small electret microphone connected to an amplifier block, in this case a single transistor.

The signal from the microphone is then sent to the part of the circuit that will turn a load on and off. For this, a bistable multivibrator was used, or as it’s called in the world of digital logic and Minecraft circuits, an S-R flip-flop. This flip-flop needs two inputs; one to store the value and another to erase the stored value. For that, it’s two more transistors. The first time the circuit senses a clap, it stores the value in the flip-flop. The next time a clap is sensed, the circuit is reset.

Output is as simple as a LED and a buzzer, but once you have that, connecting a relay is a piece of cake. That’s the complete circuit of a clapper using five transistors, something that just can’t be done with other builds centered around a 555 timer chip.

Inside The Clapper

September 29, 2013 by 21 Comments

clapper

Hackaday readers above a certain age will probably remember the fabulously faddish products developed by Joseph Enterprises. These odd gadgets included the Ove’ Glove, VCR Co-Pilot, the Creosote Sweeping Log, and Chia Pet (Cha-Cha-Cha-Chia) as mainstays of late night commercials, but none were as popular as The Clapper, everyone’s favorite sound-activated switch from the 1980s. [Richard] put up a great virtual teardown of The Clapper, that provides a lot of insight into how this magic relay box actually works, along with some historical context for the world The Clapper was introduced to.

Sound activated switches are nothing new, but the way The Clapper did it was just slightly brilliant. Instead of listening to every sound, the mic inside the magic box sends everything through a series of filters to come up with a very narrow bandpass filter centered around 2500 Hz. This trigger is analyzed by a SGS Thompson ST6210 microcontroller ( 4MHz, ~1kB ROM, 64 bytes of RAM, and 12 I/O pins ) to listen for two repeating triggers  within 200 milliseconds. The entire system – including the source code for the MCU – can be seen in the official patent, US5493618.

The Clapper sold many millions of units at a time when a lot of homes were assuredly in a pre-microelectronics world. Yes, in 1986, a lot of TVs had microcontrollers and maybe a washer/dryer combo may have had a few thousand transistors between them. Other than that, The Clapper was many household’s introduction to the ubiquitous computing power we see today, and all with less capability than an Arduino.