Remember The Clapper? It was a home automation tool (of sorts) that let you turn appliances on and off by clapping. [Kevin O’Connor] has built something rather similar, if more terrifying. It’s called The Screamer.

The build is based around a Sonoff S31 smart switch. [Kevin] selected an off-the-shelf device because he wanted something that was safe to use with mains power out of the box. But specifically, he selected the S31 because it has an ESP8266 inside that’s easy to reprogram with the aid of ESPHome. He ended up hooking up a whole extra ESP32 with an INMP441 microphone over I2S to do the scream detection. This was achieved with a simple algorithm that looked for high amplitude noises with lots of energy in the 1000 – 4000 Hz frequency range. When a scream is detected, it flips a GPIO pin which is detected by the S31, which then toggles the state of the smart switch in turn. Job done.

It’s a simple project that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s The Screamer! If you’d like to learn more about the original Clapper that inspired this build, we’ve looked at that before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own excuses to scream at the lights and walls in your home, please only notify the tipsline if it has something vaguely to do with electronics or hackery.

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For a while now part of my email signature has been a quote from a Hackaday commenter insinuating that an article I wrote was created by a “Dumb AI”. You have my sincerest promise that I am a humble meatbag scribe just like the rest of you, indeed one currently nursing a sore shoulder due to a sporting injury, so I found the comment funny in a way its writer probably didn’t intend. Like many in tech, I maintain a skepticism about the future role of large-language-model generative AI, and have resisted the urge to drink the Kool-Aid you will see liberally flowing at the moment.

Hackaday Is Part Of The Machine

As you’ll no doubt be aware, these large language models work by gathering a vast corpus of text, and doing their computational tricks to generate their output by inferring from that data. They can thus create an artwork in the style of a painter who receives no reward for the image, or a book in the voice of an author who may be struggling to make ends meet. From the viewpoint of content creators and intellectual property owners, it’s theft on a grand scale, and you’ll find plenty of legal battles seeking to establish the boundaries of the field.

Anyway, once an LLM has enough text from a particular source, it can do a pretty good job of writing in that style. ChatGPT for example has doubtless crawled the whole of Hackaday, and since I’ve written thousands of articles in my nearly a decade here, it’s got a significant corpus of my work. Could it write in my style? As it turns out, yes it can, but not exactly. I set out to test its forging skill.

In Which I Meet My Digital Impostor

A couple of weeks ago I covered the news of the impending re-entry of a failed Soviet Venus mission stuck in orbit since 1972. It’s a fascinating story because the craft may survive the experience, and it’s possible that by the time you read this it might have been retrieved. I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a 200 word article on the story “in the voice of the Hackaday writer Jenny List”. Here’s what it came up with:

In the early days of the Space Race, the Soviet Union launched a bold bid to reach Venus: the Venera missions. Among them was Kosmos 482, a 1972 mission that never made it past Earth’s gravity. Now, over five decades later, its descent craft is finally coming home—with a bang.

Kosmos 482 was intended to deliver a lander to Venus, but due to a malfunction in its upper stage, it was stranded in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Encased in a semi-spherical titanium shell, the descent craft—designed to survive the brutal atmosphere of Venus—has been orbiting quietly, steadily losing altitude. By early May 2025, that orbit had decayed to a precarious 232 x 136 km, setting the stage for an uncontrolled reentry around May 10th.

Unlike typical space debris, Kosmos 482’s reentry carries a bit more drama. Built to endure Venus’s hellish surface, the lander is expected to survive Earth’s atmospheric plunge mostly intact. Impact predictions estimate it will hit the ground at about 65-70 m/s, roughly the speed of a meteorite, packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering.

With an orbital inclination of 51.95 degrees, it could come down anywhere between 52°N and 52°S, adding an element of unpredictability. One thing is certain: after 53 years in limbo, Kosmos 482 is finally coming back to Earth—whether we’re ready or not.

Reading it is a fascinating experience, because superficially it feels like a Hackaday piece. It has my vague style with some phrases such as “packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering“. It’s casual in its language, and it’s captured my wordiness; in contrast to the more terse style it does when for example I ask it to do the same thing in the voice of my colleague Al Williams. It fails though in several senses, I feel it doesn’t capture my sentence style and the very British way I use punctuation, it relies on far more figures than I would put in a piece, and perhaps most importantly it has no inference. It relies only on the facts it can find, indeed those figures are a sign of it overusing them, and it doesn’t go further in commenting on any likely outcomes. In my human-written version of the same piece I finished up by speculating on who would own it if retrieved, and anything of that nature is absent in its output.

Don’t Worry, Humans Still Needed

So it’s clear from the above that while it can write something which is superficially coverage of the same story in my voice when writing a Hackaday piece, it still fails at the task in hand. Where we would try to give a little introduction, background and comment to the story, it instead presents only a summary of facts it has found. The fact that it can’t infer beyond the story is reassuring, because it means we meat-based Hackaday scribes still have the edge. There are many people who will tell you to look for certain words as clues to AI-written text, but the truth is much simpler. Look for the human touch.

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Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they take a whirlwind tour of the best and brightest hacks of the last week. This episode starts off with an update about that Soviet Venus lander that’s been buzzing the planet, then moves on to best practices for designing 3D printed parts, giving Chrome OS devices a new lease on life, and a unique display technology that brings a Star Wars prop to life.

You’ll also hear about designing new motherboards for beloved old computers, why you might want to put your calipers on a flatbed scanner, and a NASA science satellite that’s putting in double duty as a wartime reporter. Finally, they’ll cover the interesting physics of meteor burst communications, and the latest developments in the ongoing libogc license kerfuffle.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…

Download in DRM-free MP3.

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Episode 321 Show Notes:

News:

• Reentry prediction Soviet-era Venera Venus lander – Rocket Science
• Telegram: View @roscosmos_gk

What’s that Sound?

• Know that sound? Fill out this form for a chance to win!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Best Practices For FDM Printing
  
  • Learn 15 Print-in-Place Mechanisms In 15 Minutes

  
  

• Turning A Chromebox Into A Proper Power-Efficient PC
• Let The Wookie Win With This DIY Holochess Table
  
  • Aska3D
  • A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop
  • What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?

  
  

• A Brain Transplant For A Philips Smart Lamp
• Tearing Down A Forgotten Video Game
  
  • Pong-Story : PONG in a Chip

  
  

• Another Old ThinkPad Gets A New Motherboard
  
  • Replacement Motherboard Brings New Lease Of Life To Classic Thinkpads
  • Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

  
  

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  
  • Move Over, Lithophane: 3D Printed 3D Photos With Gaussian Splats
  • A Single-Pixel Camera Without Moving Parts Using Compressed Sensing
  • Scan Your Caliper For Physical Part Copies

  
  

• Tom’s Picks:
  
  • Studying QR Code Degradation
  • The World’s Longest Range LED Flashlight
  • Open Source ELINT Accidentally From NASA

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications
• RTEMS Statement Deepens Libogc License Controversy
  
  • Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community

  
  

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/hackad…

Intuitively, you think that everything that you stretch will pull back, but you wouldn’t expect a couple of pieces of plastic to win. Yet, researchers over at [AMOLF] have figured out a way to make a mechanism that will eventually shrink once you pull it enough.

Named “Counter-snapping instabilities”, the mechanism is made out of the main sub-components that act together to stretch a certain amount until a threshold is met. Then the units work together and contract until they’re shorter than their initial length. This is possible by using compliant joints that make up each of the units. We’ve seen a similar concept in robotics.

Potentially this may be used as a unidirectional actuator, allowing movement inch by inch. In addition, one application mentioned may be somewhat surprising: damping. If a structure or body is oscillating through a positive feedback loop it may continue till it becomes uncontrollable. If these units are used, after a certain threshold of oscillation the units will lock and retract, therefore stopping further escalation.

Made possible by the wonders of compliant mechanics, these shrinking instabilities show a clever solution to some potential niche applications. If you want to explore the exciting world of compliance further, don’t be scared to check out this easy to print blaster design!

youtube.com/embed/KxtkcL0z5j0?…

Thanks to [I’m Not Real] for the tip!

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