A blogger named Nick Bild doesn't want to let the historical experience of dial-up Internet disappear. Through clever design, he has successfully made Wi-Fi network data sound similar to the old dial-up Internet.Before DSL and fiber optic internet became common, all data had to be transmitted over phone lines. Since phone lines are not designed for digital signals, internet companies had to use modems to convert digital signals into analog signals that could be transmitted (i.e., sound).
The nostalgic squeal when connecting to the Internet, familiar to people born in the 1990s and earlier, is the "handshake" signal for two computers to negotiate a communication protocol. Once the connection is established, the squeal turns into the "squeak" of actual data transfer.
To recreate this sound, Nick Bild used a Raspberry Pi 3 and a secondary USB Wi-Fi adapter to collect network traffic from the target computer.
This data is then sent to an Adafruit QT Py microcontroller, which converts the data to specific amplitudes and outputs the analog signal through an onboard DAC.
The output analog signal is then fed into a small power amplifier and played out by a small 2W speaker.
Nick Bild revealed in his Hackaday project that he added random amplitude and frequency adjustments to make the output sound more interesting, but all the data was derived from real Wi-Fi network traffic.
