How do I make a machine “blank screen” for a period of time (as a penalty) if certain noise.....

You can get information from the microphone by doing something like:

arecord -d1 /dev/null -vvv

You might have to play with the settings a little, such as:

arecord -d1 -Dhw:0 -c2 -fS16_LE /dev/null -vvv

From there on out, it's a simple matter of parsing the output.

3 years ago

My 2 cents for the C or C++ solution: maybe not the most effective approach, but on Linux, you can use the ALSA API (built-in audio handling library of Linux) and use some numerical technique (for example, calculating the average sound level each second) to obtain the level of noise.

Then you can check it in an infinite loop, and if it's greater than a preset treshold, you can use the X11 library to turn off the screen for some seconds, or alternatively (less elegant, but it works) invoke the chvt command using system("chvt 3; sleep 15; chvt 7 ");.

3 years ago