chromadrone

A Chrome extension that plays a sci-fi ship engine drone based on what's on your screen. Scroll and it throttles up.

Think background hum on the Nostromo or the Enterprise engine room, running as a thin layer over whatever you're browsing. Dark pages go deep and heavy, bright pages open up, color brings out the harmonics.

Then open the background generator (or the accompanying signal.html test) and play with different colors and styles. It's the best way to hear what it does.

install

1. Unzip the download somewhere you'll keep it (Chrome loads it from that folder).
2. Go to chrome://extensions in the address bar.
3. Turn on Developer mode (top right).
4. Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder.
5. Pin it from the puzzle-piece menu so the icon stays in your toolbar.

Updating: unzip the new version over the old folder, then hit the reload arrow on the extension card.

use

Click the icon, hit engage. Browse like normal.

characters

nostromo - grimy, rumble heavy. enterprise - smoother, tonal, more space. derelict - metallic, inharmonic, winds down when you scroll.

volume

Master level.

bulkhead

Low pass on the whole ship. Pull it down to hear the engine through a sealed door, all the way to a 30 Hz hum (100hz is that ideal background ship hum).

sensor

Mouse reaction. A quiet whistle while the cursor moves, pitched by height on screen and panned left/right. 0 turns it off.

reactivity

How hard and how fast the screen changes the sound. Low = slow drift, high = follows the page closely.

My setting: derelict, bulkhead around 1.1k. That's the default on a fresh install.

what it reacts to

• brightness - dark closes the filter and adds rumble, bright opens it up and adds air
• color - hue picks which harmonics ring (reds low, blues high), saturation sets how loud they get, gray pages are just hum
• warm vs cool - warm colors make the engine beat faster, cool keeps it steady
• detail - busy pages breathe more noise into the tone
• motion - video, animation, lightboxes, anything that changes on screen
• scroll - throttles the engine up, spools back down about 2 sec after you stop

The popup has meters for all of it, so you can see what it's reading.

limits

• Can't read chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store, or the built-in PDF viewer. The drone holds its last state there.
• DRM video (Netflix etc) captures as black.
• Chrome only (or Chromium browsers like Edge and Brave).
• Low end needs real speakers or headphones. Laptop speakers lose most of it.

privacy

It takes a low quality screenshot of the visible tab about 1.5 times a second, shrinks it to 64x36 pixels in memory, pulls the numbers out and throws it away. Nothing is saved and nothing leaves your machine. No analytics, no network requests.

The "read all sites" permission is there because that's what Chrome requires for tab capture and the scroll listener.

screenshot

future

A dedicated color/hue automated cycling page with controls for chromadrone to react to. Test in progress here: signal.html (open after installation)

credit

https://edgey.com

nostromo for ulla