Good to Know

Every box carries its own control panel. Connect your phone to the box's Wi-Fi and the panel opens on its own — name each box, choose its sound and light color, set volume, sensitivity, and how long before it can fire again. It's the same on iPhone and Android, with nothing to install and no account to make.

Your home Wi-Fi isn't involved and neither is the internet. The boxes make their own network and talk to each other on a private radio link, so they work just as well somewhere with no signal at all.

iPhone voice memos are .m4a files, and the box plays MP3. It's the single most common snag, and it takes about ten seconds to fix.

Drop the file into the MP3 maker and download an MP3 back — it converts anything your phone can play. Same for .aac, .ogg, .flac, and video files — they all convert.

Not onto the box itself — phone browsers only allow microphone access over a secure connection, and the box serves its panel locally without one. That's why recording lives here on the site, where it's permitted.

Record in the MP3 maker, trim it, download it, and load it onto the box. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — it all happens on your phone.

Each hop covers roughly 30–100 ft, less through exterior walls, brick, or metal. The useful part is that boxes don't need to reach each other directly — a signal will relay up to three hops, passing through the boxes in between.

In practice a box at the far end of the house still fires when someone trips the front door, as long as there's a box or two along the way. More boxes doesn't just mean more scares — it means better coverage.

Sounds are per box. Uploading a file adds it to the box you're connected to. The control panel shows you which boxes are missing it so you know what to copy where.

Sequences sync on their own. Build a routine once and every box in the mesh knows it.

We're measuring it on production hardware and will publish the real figure rather than an estimate. What we can tell you is that the always-on radio is the drain, not the scares — a busy night and a quiet one cost about the same.

Rechargeable NiMH cells are the better choice, and there's a power switch on the pack for the hours nobody's around.

Yes — new boxes join the mesh on their own, nothing to re-pair. Kits are cheaper per box and ship in one carton, but starting with one and growing works fine.

Batteries. And on the software side: no cloud control, no phone app, no over-the-air firmware updates, and no automatic sound-file sync between boxes. Some of that is on the roadmap for next year — none of it is here today, and we'd rather tell you now than let you find out on the porch.

Within [SHIP_WINDOW], US ground, with shipping calculated at checkout before you pay. Every box is assembled by hand, so orders go out in the order they arrive.