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Wednesday May 21, 2008 9:39 am
Opto-Electronic Design FakeTV
While we all know that burglars usually avoid houses where there appears to be someone in the house, if you don’t have an alarm system or a watch dog, what else can you do to be safe? Opto-Electronic Design claims their FakeTV is the answer. Controlled by computer, the multi-color LED simulates a real 27-inch TV. A built-in light sensor comes on at dusk and turns off automatically when it’s dawn. While we like the idea of saving some energy while keeping our home safe, we are not completely convinced that this is the way to go. We figure if the burglar is looking for a way to get in anyway, he/she is smart enough to notice a phony television set.
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| Opto-Electronic Design
- Related Tags:
- alarms, burglars, faketv, light sensor, opto-electronic design, safety, security
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Comments:
In any of our tests, anyway, nobody could tell the difference between the light from FakeTV and a real, operating television. So, even if the burglar knows that FakeTV exists, that is not likely to help him in his evil quest!
For what it’s worth, this was not an “easy” design. For example, we had to design special test instruments to gather the color and intensity variation data from real television, because our professional lab instruments were not sensitive enough. It took a LOT of time to come up with suitable algorithms to emulate the TV characteristics, in all the different sorts of programming that you see. And suitably nuanced. And then it was tough to meet (okay, only slightly miss) the cost target! We used our favorite optical CAD system, ZEMAX, to design the diffuser.
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Never knew there’s something like a FakeTV exists.Thanks for the interesting thing Victor.
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I agree that the fake tv thingy probably wouldn’t stop the persistent burglar.
Why not just leave on the tv?
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Indeeed, some burglars will even enter a house they think is occupied. Scary! But that is mercifully rare. Fortuneately you don’t need to STOP the burgler, just get them to pick an easier target.
Why not leave the TV on? IT draws 100X more power, wears out (gets dimmer with time) and has no auto shut-off, so it remains on at 3:00 AM.
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