Fed up with his neighbor’s reggaeton, he invented a device to “hack” his speaker

We have all had a neighbor or roommate who keeps listening to music at excessive volume. This might be considered “normal” if they at least went at decent hours, however, there are cases where, in addition to listening to loud music at odd hours of the night, a genre that you don’t like plays.

Due to a situation like the previous one, a person fed up with listening to reggaeton from his neighbor decided to create a device to “hack” his speaker and put an end to his “torture” with a Raspberry Pi.

Hack your neighbor’s speaker

The events occurred in Buenos Aires. The author of this invention is a programmer named Roni Bandini who explained how he carried out the entire process from an article on Medium. As he mentions, she was inspired by the old TV-B-Gone, which was a small device the size of a garage door opener with a button to turn off televisions in bars and restaurants. In fact, his little project is called ‘Reggaetón-Be-Gone’.

Bandini’s creation is trained to be able to detect any reggaeton song and turn off or interfere with the speaker signal so that the music stops playing so loud. His first step was train an AI so that he might recognize this genre. To do this, it was enough to download several songs and develop a classification algorithm. The model was created to Linux and ARM processors, so he was able to integrate it into a simple Raspberry Pi.

Bandini connected the board to a small OLED screen and encapsulated everything to give it a more attractive touch, along with a button to make the device work. In addition to documenting his steps in his Medium article, he also uploaded the model to Github so that more people might try his invention.

How does the invention to “block” reggaeton work?

The model is capable of detecting reggaeton patterns and act when a set sound limit is exceeded, as Bandini explains. To do this, the invention determines the target volume and reduces it until the established decibel rate limit is reached. The invention is capable of interfering with the signal to reduce the sound until it is inaudible to the person living on a lower or upper floor.

Once the algorithm threshold is exceeded, the model is able to use the commands rfcomm y l2ping to the MAC address of the bluetooth speaker to send requests to the device and attack the bluetooth signalreducing its effectiveness or disconnecting it completely.

Although it is a very ingenious way on the part of this programmer, the reality is that The effectiveness of the device was not as successful as Bandini expected.. And the obstacles on the floor, such as walls and the distance of the connection, made a dent in the interference process. Furthermore, if the speaker was moved from one location to another point further away, the system stops working, something that is exactly what happened as Bandini explained in the text.

Related news