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Show HN: Morse code radio [audio]

morsecode.me

58 pointsbkanber43 comments

If a link is going to destroy your speakers, give you temporary deafness and a good scare I would really like to have a warning in the title.

Added a warning. Did not anticipate what this would be like when 30 people are all mashing keys at once, sorry!

Not a problem.

No worse than being on the receiving end of a pileup.

that was what I thought too... it's a good thing :)

Understandable! I am not into morse but nice work. :)

Cool idea. I'm glad I remembered how to say "ASS".

Typical morse code keyers have 2 buttons, long and short, so you don't have to worry about how long to hold it down. I think that would make this a lot easier.

Too bad our keyboards only have one button. :(

My iambic paddle is connected to my mouse; it's an easy hack.

As silly as it may sound, toys like this are the sort of thing that remind me that in this community I've found my favorite people in the world. No matter what age.

Special shout to H3NB and the other few whom actually tried to communicate back.

And this is why I make software :)

And I thank you for it :D I loved the overall UX feeling.

Even if it gets messy with so many "morsers" in the room, what's not to love about mess? For a moment there, I felt like part of an orchestra, tuning my instrument; adding my bit to a more transcendent byte, petabyte, or whatever.

Just to illustrate, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxz630u7YlQ

Oldie but goodie

This is hilarious. There's like 30 people beeping and no one can spell anything out. I was so proud of myself when I finally got "H E LL O" to appear.

I'm still stuck on the "HELLO" boss.

  function cheat(str, name) {

    if (!name) {name = me.id}

    var arr = str.split();

    for (var i=0; i<arr.length; i++) {

      socket.emit('l', {id: name, l: arr[i]});

    }

  }

  cheat("hello world!", "god");

    function cheat(m){for(var i in m)socket.emit("l", {l:m[i]})}

Yeah I've been avoiding for-in loops in Javascript since getting burned by a colleague that was attaching objects to arrays. :/

Lot of fun. Even more fun would be to give each active user a different column, but obviously that has a pretty small limit. But this is cool.

To make this work, use the space bar on your keyboard as if it were a straight key.

Don't try to send faster than about 18 WPM. Leave really long spaces between words--longer than you would otherwise.

Morse code is one of the few protocols that is readily understandable by both humans and computers. You might be on the verge of something with a lot of potential.

de w8lvn

Thanks, appreciate it! The auto-translator is set to 15 WPM, so like you said anything faster than 18 or so doesn't get recognized. If real, interested people actually end up using this I'd be happy to make that user-configurable!

i love it -- de n q 6 n

My max straight key speed these days is 20, but 15 is certainly fine for this experiment.

Oh wow. This is cool. And clever. And making me remember my old morse. Who said Ham radio is dead? DE K2KD....

There is a bug in Linux where if the key is pressed and released too quickly the site assumes you're just holding it down indefinitely.

This is unfortunate since I was trying to cheat with xdotool and it kept bugging out depending on how many people were beeping along with me.

This is really cool, but quite hard. Maybe you could add some tip on how long you are supposed to hold the tones for? I'd also like to see who I am more prominently displayed, it took me a while to find it.

Thanks for the suggestions! There's certainly a steep learning curve, and based on my observations over the last few days I've come to realize that you're right, it's important to give an example to beginners so they can get a better feel for the pacing. Just a side project but I'll see if I can work that in!

Morse code instructional video from the US Army: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li8Hiwbc664

The "Juliette" and "Romeo" suggested mnemonic imagery on 4:57 was hilarious and very revealing about other suggested "attitudes" of the time and context.

I am trying to send "A", but it keeps sending "E" - anyone else noticed that ?

edit: seems like I have been timing it badly. Does work now well.

Doesn't seem to work correctly on firefox nightly, just instantly sends "E" on any letter that begins with a dot no matter how fast I key. :(

I'm in channel 2 if anyone wants to try actually morse-ing rather than mashing on the keys ;)

Maybe there should be a channel with a password that you have to morse to enter ;)

That's hilarious and might be something I build in!

Of course, this place'll be quiet after it's off HN so it may be a non-issue!

Not necessarily - in the few minutes I played with it, I managed to memorize the code for A, E, H, I, L, M, T, Y, :, and /. This seems like a great learning tool. I'm excited to keep playing with it in the future!

Thanks, I hope you do!

Oh God. If we ever need to use morse code to fight super intelligent machines. We are doomed.

Nah, piece of cake.

When I had to learn morse for my pilot license most People tried to learn using codewords for each letter. But that wa you yave to lear two different thigs. For me the easiest way is to take any text and start translating it in to written morse. Once you are fluent writting you take any morse program and start doing the same into sounds. And then listening. The learning rithm is similar to learning to type in a keyboard. In a couple of weeks you can be pretty good.

But then you have to learn two different things, Sorry for this aweful sentence! writing from the iphone it´s difficul to to spot sometimes.

"But that wa you yave to lear two different thigs"

this is pretty cool -- it actually works if a few people send proper morse.

Gah, not done morse code in years. This is so difficult

Friend of mine joked that "this is the slowest IRC ever".

The site is vulnerable to xss

Thanks for the heads up, will fix. Edit: wait, is it? I'm not seeing it..

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