Flying-Toast's Disco Trigger Puts an Old Fire Alarm Pull to a New, and Funky, Purpose

Pseudonymous YouTuber "Flying-Toast," hereafter simply "Toast," has turned a second-hand fire alarm into possibly the world's most ill-advised party trigger — wiring it up to trigger music and disco lights when pulled.

"Have you ever been scrambling to get yourself out of a burning building and stopped to think right now might be a good time for a dance party," Toast rhetorically enquires by way of introduction to the project. "Yeah, that happens to me all the time too. So, when I was browsing eBay the other day and found someone selling a fire alarm trigger I was intrigued: I immediately bought one with the intent to make this a reality."

The heart of the build, which it must be noted is probably not a great thing to do to an otherwise-unmarked fire alarm which those not in-the-know might expect to actually trigger an alarm in the event of a fire, is an Espressif ESP8266 microcontroller. Ditching the original trigger electronics, Toast added the ESP8266 and a battery in a 3D-printed housing so as to avoid having to route cables through the wall.

"The fire alarm mechanism itself is basically a glorified toggle switch," Toast explains. "When you pull the handle it flips [a] switch which turns on the ESP. In fact, that mechanism was actually broken when it arrived — but I was able to fix it using a pretty janky combination of paper clips, rubber bands, and epoxy."

When triggered, the ESP8266 inside the fire alarm sends an ESP-NOW signal to a Bluetooth speaker system fitted with another ESP8266 and relay-equipped disco lights. A couple of off-the-shelf Wi-Fi relays, which have their own ESP8266 modules inside, were reprogrammed to turn the house lights off and the disco lights on when the trigger is activated — completing the pull-for-disco "alarm" system.

"Now I can finally sleep at night knowing that if there's ever a fire at least I'll be able to go down in style," Toast jokes.

The source code for the project is published to GitHub under an unspecified license, with more details available in the above video.