[HN Gopher] Using AirPods as a Morse Transmitter
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       Using AirPods as a Morse Transmitter
        
       Author : etherdream
       Score  : 112 points
       Date   : 2024-05-07 09:31 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
       | What I really need is for the buzzer in the phone to buzz out
       | Morse, so I can get information about who's sending a message
       | without taking it out of my pocket. Maybe even for short messages
       | just play out the whole message. First I guess I need to learn
       | Morse though.
        
         | hiimshort wrote:
         | May I recommend the learn Morse with google page?
         | 
         | https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/
         | 
         | I went through it a few times in a day and felt confident
         | enough to be able to solve the Morse puzzles on my own in Keep
         | Talking and Nobody Explodes when playing with friends. The site
         | made it pretty easy to pick up!
        
           | san_dimitri wrote:
           | Thank you for this website. I tried so many time learning
           | Morse and often failed. With this site, I picked up half the
           | alphabet in 20 mins. All I can see now are "Tape",
           | "Submarine", "Hippo" etc.
        
             | geoffeg wrote:
             | Make sure you're not memorizing each letter's dits and
             | dahs, that'll make it much harder to receive and transmit
             | morse code at faster speeds. Better to learn the general
             | "sound" of each character, often using a Koch method
             | trainer.
        
               | fr0sty wrote:
               | +1 to the above.
               | 
               | Implementing a mental dit/dah decoder + lookup table is
               | the shortest path to being able to decode written CW ` _
               | . ___ _ ` but it will cause you problems trying to
               | receive faster CW since you can't count, assemble, lookup
               | fast enough to receive at more than 5-8WPM. And even then
               | you are generally doing "keyboard copy" where you write
               | down the letters as you hear them and then go back to
               | actually read the message you received later.
        
               | swalberg wrote:
               | +1 to this. I started learning Morse with that same
               | Google site and it's optimizing for reading, not hearing.
               | Took me time to unlearn everything and do it properly.
        
         | givinguflac wrote:
         | For what it's worth, you could set a custom vibration for each
         | important contact in settings.
        
         | RobotToaster wrote:
         | Or a miniature ticker tape printer, so your texts can come out
         | your pocket like a telegram.
        
           | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
           | Shut up and take my money.
        
           | saltcured wrote:
           | This should use some kind of impact printer, so the vibration
           | of it working also indicates incoming messages.
        
         | fr0sty wrote:
         | I'll put in a vote for: https://lcwo.net/ (Learn CW Online)
         | 
         | If your goal is to be "conversational" in CW I suggest you
         | crank up the character speed until you are not able to count
         | individual dits/dahs anymore. This will probably be somewhere
         | in the 25-35WPM range. The goal is "instant character
         | recognition" where you hear the sound/shape of the entire
         | character rather than counting elements, assembling them in
         | your head, and doing a mental hash lookup on the result.
         | 
         | If you have trouble receiving or copying down the 5letter
         | groups at this speed resist the temptation to add "farnsworth"
         | spacing (extra gaps between letters). Instead increase the word
         | spacing until you have enough down time in between to get
         | everything copied.
        
         | amatecha wrote:
         | I had this exact thought the other day, I could make morse code
         | vibration patterns for whoever is calling/texting so I know who
         | it is without looking :)
         | 
         | btw small world, I assume you're the person with the same name
         | on other sites going back many years .. I was someone who got
         | in touch with you like.. easily 20 years ago about some
         | networking stuff... chatting in a cove-like space :)
        
       | Ecco wrote:
       | Time well wasted :)
        
       | chadrs wrote:
       | This is a cool toy, I've been wanting to do something similar
       | with my flipper zero to make a BT morse keyboard.
       | 
       | This also reminds me of TapXR, which I would totally buy if did
       | morse, instead of inventing their own encoding. I get it, theirs
       | is probably way faster but fluency is morse is more general
       | purpose.
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | > more general purpose
         | 
         | Just how general purpose is it these days? I learned it for
         | amateur radio (a couple years ago), which is probably the only
         | "common" place to use Morse. And even there it's all but dead
        
           | swalberg wrote:
           | It's getting more and more popular within amateur radio. If I
           | look on the Parks On The Air spots page, there are currently
           | 20 people in a park across the US doing Morse, and I know
           | that when I go to a park I can knock out 60 Morse contacts in
           | about an hour on one band since there are so many hunters.
           | 
           | Clubs like Long Island CW have thousands of members and run
           | classes all day to teach people Morse and help with their
           | operating skills. Just this morning I joined the weekly CWOps
           | mini contest which is so popular they have it in 4 x 1 hour
           | sessions. And that's on top of the 3 medium speed sessions on
           | Mondays, and 2 slow speed ones.
           | 
           | There might not be as much ragchew activity but between
           | contests, DXers, and POTA, there's CW activity all over the
           | bands.
        
           | amatecha wrote:
           | Continuous Wave / Morse is definitely not "all but dead". In
           | fact, it's in literally continuous use, 24/7, worldwide. If
           | you turn on an HF radio (and have an antenna up) and tune to
           | an open band, you will hear morse code.
           | 
           | Go here and see a live map of CW contacts picked up by the
           | Reverse Beacon Network in the past 10 minutes (only the most
           | recent 100, which is the most I could get it to show at
           | once): https://www.reversebeacon.net/main.php?zoom=44.44,6.37
           | ,2.40&...
        
           | jabroni_salad wrote:
           | There was a downswing awhile ago because the macro users
           | switched to using digital modes. People who want to make
           | handmade CW contacts are still having fun and that is
           | attracting some people to the space.
           | 
           | Also, knowing Morse has been my escape room superpower.
           | Escape room designers love Morse.
        
       | zer0w1re wrote:
       | Neat! I wonder if both airpods could be used more like paddles
       | for dot/dash, rather than one click for dot and two clicks for
       | dash.
        
       | als0 wrote:
       | Awesome. This is why I come to Hacker News.
        
       | lenerdenator wrote:
       | In five years, wireless headphones will be the new thing ruining
       | ham radio.
        
       | _justinfunk wrote:
       | This would be sweet using the tap feature in the previous
       | generations of AirPods.
        
       | finaard wrote:
       | A while ago I hooked up the ambient light sensor of android
       | devices as morse input for Emacs:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrvhiiZyf8
        
         | FredPret wrote:
         | Straight out of Cryptonomicon
        
       | aidenn0 wrote:
       | Because of how it works you can also key using the pause and next
       | multimedia buttons on your keyboard. Now we need to make the
       | snake eat its tail by rigging an Iambic paddle to send pause/next
       | events.
        
       | dheera wrote:
       | Another method -- Why not use one airpod to emit a constant
       | sinewave and then use the other airpod's microphone listen for
       | the amplitude of that sine wave to detect whether or not the
       | microphone hole it is covered by a finger? I think it could make
       | for a much faster and more efficient morse input, since you can
       | detect dots and dashes directly instead of requiring a double-
       | press as a dash.
       | 
       | There's a good chance you could also just do it with the
       | amplitude of ambient noise and forget the sine wave generator.
        
       | elwell wrote:
       | I guess the interesting thing here is that it's being simply
       | handled by JS:
       | navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('pause', () => {
       | press('.')         })
       | navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('nexttrack', () => {
       | press('-')         })
       | navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('previoustrack', () => {
       | inputCodes = ''           showInput()           say('backspace')
       | clearTimeout(timerId)           txtOutput.value =
       | txtOutput.value.slice(0, -1)         })
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-08 23:00 UTC)