Locating the source of a mysterious beep with Claude

Why it matters

A developer facing an intermittent beep from an unpacked box room turned to Claude Code rather than emptying every box. Working with the AI coding tool, he built Beep Locator, a Python web application that turns spare devices scattered around a room into microphone-equipped listeners. The devices connect over WebSockets, detect candidate beeps using a Fast Fourier Transform and a high-pass filter, and align their audio recordings using a chirp played by one listener, allowing the server to triangulate where a sound originated. Claude grounded the design in an academic acoustic ranging paper, BeepBeep, which showed that commodity speakers and microphones could achieve accurate device-to-device ranging without special infrastructure. The developer tested the system by clapping at known spots, then let it hunt the beep, which turned out to be an old carbon monoxide detector with dying batteries. The project illustrates how AI-assisted development can move from a casual prompt to a working distributed sensing system, including live code updates pushed to listener devices mid-run.