Haptic baby monitor catches wearer's attention
Anyone who has ever slept through a morning alarm can tell you that even the most piercing sounds don't always wake a person from a deep sleep. Likewise, hearing a baby cry on the other side of the monitor may not always wake a parent in the middle of the night. So what is the solution ? This haptic baby monitor created by [Guy Dupont] certainly looks promising.
[Guy] took a pretty standard baby monitor from VTech and opened it up to see how he could link a vibration motor into the stock circuit. He originally thought he would have to do some signal processing magic to determine the amplitude of the audio, but then he realized that the five LEDs on the front of the device that s lights to indicate audio level were already doing the hard work. for him.
Detect the audio level by reading the state of the LEDs.So he wired each of the LEDs to the pins of a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller, and wrote code that would query their state several hundred times per second. Dividing the total number of LEDs by the number currently lit gives him a good average he can use to adjust the intensity of the vibration motor he has built into a stretchy armband.
>For extra points, [Guy] also uses the XIAO's Bluetooth capability to provide a rudimentary configuration service - simply connect to the MCU with a Bluetooth serial app on your computer or phone, and trigger a value between 0 and 10 to increase motor intensity. There is also a BLE feature that can be read from a client device to determine the currently sensed audio amplitude, which could be used to determine how well the baby is sleeping over time. Alternatively, as demonstrated at the end of the video, you can use it to play Flappy Bird.
It's a nifty modification that could potentially hold promise for parents who need a little extra help keeping an eye on their miniature humans. This isn't the first time we've seen hackers try to improve on the classic baby monitor, but it's arguably the most accessible attempt we've seen to date.
Anyone who has ever slept through a morning alarm can tell you that even the most piercing sounds don't always wake a person from a deep sleep. Likewise, hearing a baby cry on the other side of the monitor may not always wake a parent in the middle of the night. So what is the solution ? This haptic baby monitor created by [Guy Dupont] certainly looks promising.
[Guy] took a pretty standard baby monitor from VTech and opened it up to see how he could link a vibration motor into the stock circuit. He originally thought he would have to do some signal processing magic to determine the amplitude of the audio, but then he realized that the five LEDs on the front of the device that s lights to indicate audio level were already doing the hard work. for him.
Detect the audio level by reading the state of the LEDs.So he wired each of the LEDs to the pins of a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller, and wrote code that would query their state several hundred times per second. Dividing the total number of LEDs by the number currently lit gives him a good average he can use to adjust the intensity of the vibration motor he has built into a stretchy armband.
>For extra points, [Guy] also uses the XIAO's Bluetooth capability to provide a rudimentary configuration service - simply connect to the MCU with a Bluetooth serial app on your computer or phone, and trigger a value between 0 and 10 to increase motor intensity. There is also a BLE feature that can be read from a client device to determine the currently sensed audio amplitude, which could be used to determine how well the baby is sleeping over time. Alternatively, as demonstrated at the end of the video, you can use it to play Flappy Bird.
It's a nifty modification that could potentially hold promise for parents who need a little extra help keeping an eye on their miniature humans. This isn't the first time we've seen hackers try to improve on the classic baby monitor, but it's arguably the most accessible attempt we've seen to date.
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