Sono – window noise cancelling system | Hacker News Reader

Sono – window noise cancelling system

id2studio.at

10 points2a0c4013 comments

"With its concentric broadband antenna rings, it harvests the energy of electromagnetic noise from Wi-Fi, and similar signals and this way also reduces the level of e-smog pollution in your environment."

This is nonsense.

We hope it's nonsense. This idea that constant exposure to EM is without consequence is unproven. If your immediate response is something about "non-ionizing" then you know nothing about the many animal experiments that demonstrate behavior and biological effects from magnetic fields and EM exposure.

My immediate response is that putting some tiny rings of metal on a window somewhere in a room will not somehow absorb and decrease the amount of EM in a room by any measurable amount, harmful or otherwise.

Additionally, the amount of energy that could be harvested this way is a few orders of magnitude less than what would be required to oscillate a window with enough force to cancel sound.

This looks like a concept piece, not an actual product. An alternative is to simply have soundproof windows. For fresh air without opening the window, you can install a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) unit. These units extract stale air from a room and replace it with fresh (filtered) air. They run continuously 24 hrs. They are installed in homes with air-tight insulation (e.g. homes that meet the Passive Haus standard). You don't get a breeze though when the windows are all closed. To actually move the air around the room, (create a breeze similar to opening a window) you'd need to install a ceiling fan.

From the Designers-making-shit-up-again department as Slashdot would've put it.

Unfortunately, this seems to be about hypothetical product design for a fictional technology, not about the technology itself.

While I agree this is probably fictional, the technology of canceling out sound waves (Well any wave) is pretty simple. Obviously filtering and replacing the sounds is more complex, but you could probably filter out external sounds in this way.

Wi-Fi energy harvesting, at least at the level required for active noise-canceling, is very much fictional technology.

Not sure if it's fictional, I've worked in a few secure buildings i my life and we had an oscillator glued to the glass of every external window.

This was basically to prevent the use of any laser or parabolic microphones, however it also had a nice effect in which it really dampened the noise not only from the outside, but also interestingly enough the internal noise which bounces off the windows in your office.

If you would stand and talk near a large window with one of those things on it you will actually hear some muffling in the conversation you are having with the guy next to you.

The device it self was fairly small about the size of a match box, and I'm pretty sure it was nothing more than some piezoelectric oscillator that generates random noise in the window.

For it to be completely noise canceling well if you tie it to an external microphone you are pretty much getting noise canceling headphones on a Window.

The amount of power needed for such devices is also fairly small there are "vibration" stickers that you stick to glass and some other surfaces that run on a single cell battery, and to cancel the noise you'll need even less power.

From what it looks to me if you pretty much glue your active noise canceling headphones to a vibration speaker and stick it on a window you get this device.

This looks promising because a lot of people are (over)exposed to noise these days. It is not clear from site but it appears this only works when window is closed. I've been thinking from time to time about similar device which would cancel noise while window is open.

Yeah, I've also wonder about that. I know in my high school a few kids in my physics class did a project with a local bakery to try and cut our machine noise by inverting the sound waves and playing them back to cancel it out... I never found out if they got it to work properly. Cool idea though.

That is probably the basis of the idea. I know it is a long, long way from an idea to the product. I presume that knowledge of acoustics, electronics, digital signal processing, software dev and probably more is needed to transform this idea into a "killer" product.

The effect has been known for some time, and the concept isn't exactly new. I'm sorry to say that the presentation looks very amateurish, which makes it rather unconvincing.

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