Emergency alerts broadcasting through the house
Submitted by Basildane on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 5:12am.
We have an "All Hazards" radio receiver that we need to be able to hear throughout the house. Sometimes we have a tornado watch, and we don't hear it because the radio is in another part of the house.
I built an interface that plugs into the receiver headphone jack, and plugs into the Trixbox RJ-11 jack. Whenever an alert comes in, it takes the zap extension off hook, plays the alert - which goes to a paging group that goes to the whole house. It also comes up on my blackberry. Then, when the alert is finished, it hangs up the channel.
This device has a bunch of uses I think. You could connect anything to it. For example, a volunteer fireman who wants his scanner to do a page on the trixbox...
I am going to build 2 more prototype boards in addition to the one I have in production at home, if anyone thinks this would be useful. Wife gave it two thumbs up.
I love trixbox.
Correct. 3 seconds after
Mon, 04/14/2008 - 10:54am
Correct. 3 seconds after the audio stops, it hangs up.
Here is a picture of the prototype.
http://www.aquilatech.com/Products/interface/interface1.jpg
Awesome,
Now add one of
Mon, 04/14/2008 - 12:17pm
Awesome,
Now add one of these decoders:
and you have a fantastic firehouse paging system. Could also be used for volunteer fire staffs.
Scott
Just another note....
Mon, 04/14/2008 - 9:12pm
Very very impressive. I have been thinking about building an xml script that pulls the XML from NOAA for our area and then processes it and uses cepstral to do the same thing. We have a client that has a large industrial machine factory. When a bad storm rolls through, they take their machines off-line as a power flicker seems to reek havoc on their equipment. They've invested a lot of money into backup generators and system back-ups but when it all boils down to it, they try to be very very aware of bad weather.
We've proposed a system to them for their office, and they are really excited about us transitioning them to a new system. As crazy as it sounds, this was one of the HUGE selling points of TrixBox.
They love it when we think out of the box and we love a customer who likes to pay for out of the box thinking. When we finish it, I'll pass it along to everyone.
Basildane,
I love this. Is
Mon, 04/14/2008 - 11:32pm
Basildane,
I love this. Is there any chance you can share a schematic?
Here is a link to some of my older weather radio interfacing. This was way before Asterisk, for my hobby. Perhaps it will give you some further ideas.
http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wxalert/plan.html
thanks for all your nice comments
Tue, 04/15/2008 - 5:49pm
indesignfirm: I'm with you on the storms. I wrote a Wake-On-Lan program that you may find useful. It has an "Emergency OFF" button that we use to shutdown all servers and workstations in the house in the event of a thunderstorm. Also use it to boot up a backup server, then shut it down after the daily backup is complete. It is free and on my website if you want it. (doesn't do linux yet) http://www.aquilatech.com
bubba: I was going to ask $60 for the prototypes (haven't built them yet). Just to cover my costs. The pc boards were industrially manufactured. I'll write up some better description and put it on the web page.
Web page
Wed, 04/16/2008 - 7:42am
There isn't much to that
Thu, 04/24/2008 - 9:22am
There isn't much to that interface. so it's very easy to build. And I'm not sure who made your boards, but www.farcircuits.net is very reasonable.
Member Since:
2007-06-30