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Comment by bschwindHN | Hacker News Reader

I turned my original RPi (I think it was the one that launched in 2012?) into a noise machine in my bedroom, thanks to scripts from a friend. It dutifully starts rain noises in the late evening and stops them in the morning. The original one my friend made does a better job at fading the audio over time (something is wrong with my ALSA config), and also switches to birds chirping in the morning to wake him up.

It's a great use-case for it as it's not very demanding, and essentially doesn't require networking aside from NTP to keep the clock up to date.

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I made a nice brown(ish) noise generator for my bedroom. I use it at night and sometimes during the day when I want to meditate, or something. It uses an ATtiny85 to generate white noise, which I filter through a resistor-capacitor. I put it in a mounting I made and used varnished balsa wood to make a nice box for it.

ATtiny85 are dinky little chips to use.

It's instant-on and off, and I don't have to worry about corrupting anything, or some upgrade quirk like I do with the RPi. I was still using my original RPi on a permanent basis until recently. RPis are not obsolete if your requirements are modest. Try running X-Windows and Firefox and you're in for trouble, though.

Thanks for giving me ideas for my own pile of ATtiny85's I have lying around:)

You're welcome. I did a write-up from some time ago: https://mcturra2000.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/brown-noise-sle... AFAIK the schematic is accurate. Use the bottom one because I do like the filtering. White noise tends to be too harsh for my liking. Although it is one of my earlier projects, it has proved to be a good and enduring solution (to me, anyway).

It has since acquired a snazzier encasement using balsa wood. I bought some wire mesh for the front of the speaker, to give it protection.

If you want to do day/night timing (although I personally think that's overkill) , you could think about adding a DS3231 clock. I recommend steering clear of those really cheap Chinese modules (DS1307, if memory serves). They're a complete waste of time.

Have fun!

Excellent, thanks again!! This may just be the inspiration I've needed to start playing around with hardware again. I've mostly got all the parts I need to get going, just need to find the time :)

Can you discuss the setup more?

Are you using speakers or headphones? If headphones, wired or wireless? If speakers, where do you place them and is strange sound localization an issue?

I recently tried sleeping with inexpensive Bluetooth headband headphones, which was a great expensive. I liked the feel around my head, but am curious about the speaker option.

I'm using a cheap "can" bluetooth speaker, nothing fancy. Because it's mostly just noise from the rain, and the speaker is cheap, there aren't any sound localization issues I'm aware of.

My friend was using a much nicer stereo setup for much higher realism for the rain sounds.

I also still have an OG one for similar purposes (shifts room lights to orange in the evening, brightens them up blue in the morning, plays music and radio on a schedule). Stays up uninterrupted for months at a time, sd card got corrupted maybe once or twice in over a decade.

if anyone else is just looking for the noise generator, theres one built into ios now so you can use your ipad or iphone. This is under accessibility - audio/visual - background sounds. It’s ostensibly for tinnitus, but as with all good accessibility, others can use it.

I might use it, but instead my wife and I just turn the air purifier to maximum to get a lot of brown noise .

Whaaaaat, this is awesome, I had no idea!

Do you run it through a stereo or a small speaker ?

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