Dan Q

Tag: sounds

BeepAlive – keeping my soundbar from going to sleep

My living room TV is attached to an ageing Windows box that we use as a media centre and middleweight gaming1 PC. To better fill the room with sound (I hate those tinny flat speakers they like to put into TVs these days!), the TV is also attached to a soundbar.

Line-art illustration showing a computer attached to a 4K TV, in turn attached to a speaker.

The problem is that the soundbar keeps shutting itself down. If it doesn’t receive any signals for ~20 minutes, it enters sleep mode2. It automatically turns itself on when the TV turns on, but it turns itself off all by itself.

This is annoying, because if we pause what we’re watching for a conversation or something, the soundbar switches itself off, even though the computer and television are still switched-on. It’s doubly-annoying because we then have to get up and walk over to it to switch it back on again, because the dog ate the remote3.

But what if I could solve this… with software?4

Top surface of a TV soundbar showing plus, minus, and power buttons, and a red LED.
LED’s gone red again?5 Sigh. Whose turn is it to get up and press the button?

My solution is BeepAlive, a little Go program that runs in a Windows system tray and makes a very quiet noise once every 9 minutes. I’ve tuned the noise so that it’s quiet enough that I can’t hear it unless I’m specifically listening for it… but loud enough that it the soundbar sees that there are still audio signals coming in, so it doesn’t go to sleep.

Now, so long as the media centre computer and TV remain powered-on, the soundbar stays awake. And that’s how a hacky engineer like me can solve a hardware problem with a software tool.

Footnotes

1 Mostly the gaming’s done by the kids, and they’re likely-as-not to use the Switch or Steam Deck instead… or, when we’re not at the Chicory House, Bee, the Bazzite-powered gaming rig I set up in the playroom… but in principle it’s equipped for gaming. I guess we sometimes fire a Jackbox Party Pack on it when we have guests?

2 It doesn’t even seem to save any power to be in sleep mode: my power checker tool says it draws basically the same amount whichever mode it’s in!

3 It’s triply-annoying because our soundbar is the only infrared-controlled device in our house that doesn’t follow the IrDA standard, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to automate switching it on from the TV remote, our Flic hub, any “universal remote” etc. I managed to pull off a replay using my Flipper Zero, but that’s not a solution I want to put into the hands of the kids (or anywhere that the dog might eat it). I suppose I could buy a replacement remote, but I don’t feel like giving any more money to a company that turned their nose up at IrDA.

4 Okay, so technically I solved this with software a few years ago, but I misplaced the software and it, frankly, wasn’t very good. My thinking is that by doing it better, and open-sourcing it, I’ll be able to find it when I need it next. And as a bonus, it might just maybe help somebody else, someday.

5 At our regular house, rather than the Chicory House, the soundbar lives above the TV, close to the ceiling, and it’s hard to even see the annoying LED. So I mounted a tiny mirror, about a quarter of the size of a fingernail, to the ceiling above it to improve its visibility from the sofa. Now that’s a hardware solution!

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Firsts and Lasts

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A lot of attention is paid, often in retrospect, to the experience of the first times in our lives. The first laugh; the first kiss; the first day at your job1. But for every first, there must inevitably be a last.

I recall a moment when I was… perhaps the age our eldest child is now. As I listened to the bats in our garden, my mother told me about how she couldn’t hear them as clearly as she could when she was my age. The human ear isn’t well-equipped to hear that frequency that bats use, and while children can often pick out the sounds, the ability tends to fade with age.

Face of a bat, hanging upside-down.
“Helloooo? Are you even listening to me?”

This recollection came as I stayed up late the other month to watch the Perseids. I lay in the hammock in our garden under a fabulously clear sky as the sun finished setting, and – after being still and quiet for a time – realised that the local bat colony were out foraging for insects. They flew around and very close to me, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t hear them at all.

There must necessarily have been a “last time” that I heard a bat’s echolocation. I remember a time about ten years ago, at the first house in Oxford of Ruth, JTA and I (along with Paul), standing in the back garden and listening to those high-pitched chirps. But I can’t tell you when the very last time was. At the time it will have felt unremarkable rather than noteworthy.

First times can often be identified contemporaneously. For example: I was able to acknowledge my first time on a looping rollercoaster at the time.

The Tower of Terror, Camelot Theme Park, circa 1990s; a steel rollercoaster track dips in and out of a fibreglass castle structure.
The Tower of Terror at Camelot, circa 1994, was my first looping rollercoaster2. The ride was disassembled in 2000 and, minus its “tower” theming3lived on for a while as Twist ‘N’ Shout at Loudoun Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland before that park shut down. I looked at some recent satellite photography and I’m confident it’s now been demolished.
Last times are often invisible at the time. You don’t see the significance of the everyday and routine except in hindsight.

I wonder what it would be like if we had the same level of consciousness of last times as we did of firsts. How differently might we treat a final phone call to a loved one or the ultimate visit to a special place if we knew, at the time, that there would be no more?

Would such a world be more-comforting, providing closure at every turn? Or would it lead to a paralytic anticipatory grief: “I can’t visit my friend; what if I find out that it’s the last time?”

Footnotes

1 While watching a wooden train toy jiggle down a length of string, reportedly; Sarah Titlow, behind the school outbuilding, circa 1988; and five years ago this week, respectively.

2 Can’t see the loop? It’s inside the tower. A clever bit of design conceals the inversion from outside the ride; also the track later re-enters the fort (on the left of the photo) to “thread the needle” through the centre of the loop. When they were running three trains (two in motion at once) at the proper cadence, it was quite impressive as you’d loop around while a second train went through the middle, and then go through the middle while a third train did the loop!

3 I’m told that the “tower” caught fire during disassembly and was destroyed.

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