Slashdot Mirror
Marking Time - Controlling a Noisemaker from a PC?
fallen1 asks: "My company is engaged in making trusses for various home, business, and industrial applications. One thing our truss plant does not have is a signal device to keep everyone on schedule for shift starts, breaks, lunch, and so on. Currently the plant manager is responsible for making sure everyone takes off when they are supposed to. This is, of course, highly inefficient and is causing problems. They approached me, asking to research into time control devices that can signal all the starts and stops (our time clock is integrated into our POS/sales system). Of course, one of my first stops was Slashdot ;-). Please keep in mind I am fairly new to Linux. So, in the interest of trying to keep the cost down, does anyone know of a Linux software/hardware combo that can control a horn or bell - as well as length of ring/tone - for multiple events? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated." A friend of mine once wired his CD remote control to the computer and wrote a simple timer in C: Voila! A simple alarm clock (assuming the remote was pointed in the right direction). A similar principle would also work here. You could tie a computer to the aux-in of an amp, which is in turn tied to LARGE speakers at both ends of the plant, and have it make the right noises at the right time. I'm sure this has been done in a variety of ways, before. If you've done something like this with a computer, particularly at an industrial scale, please share the details.
Well, seeing as the computer has a good clock, just use cron to either :
a. play an MP3/WAV/AU whatever over the sound card, which in turn is plugged into the speaker
b. make some noise over the PC speaker (if for whatever reason you don't have a sound card, course this would require a little wiring, but not a whole hell of a lot)
No fancy serial port crap. No goofy controllers.
Crontab.
mpg123.
Appropriate sound card drivers.
A decently loud speaker setup.
A refurbished laptop would work excellent for this. Even an old one. Hell, I gotta 133mhz sitting here. Gimme 50 bucks for it. I'll even do the install.
Hm. No, I think I'll use it for a firewall. But you get the idea.
- billn
I've seen x86 hardware running linux being used to control bells, lights, radios, etc at firestations for dispatch alerting. It was done with some custom made hardware controlled from the serial port that had relays that were used to control the devices. It was a headless solution that took all its user input from at keypad and display on a multiline text lcd. I'm pretty sure the relay box and software was custom for this, but you may be able to find a vendor that sells gear like this. So, yes, its possible, but no I don't know of an off the shelf solution.
Step 1: FORGET LINUX
Step 2: Go down to walmart and pick up 3 or 4 five-dollar alarm clocks.
Step 3: Wire the speaker outputs of each alarm clock to your PA system.
Label each clock for what the alarm is set for. Or maybe you could spend a few extra bucks and get one that has multiple alarms instead of 3 separate alarm clocks.
Or even better, use windows, download a shareware program that plays sound events. Then you don't have to worry about compiling in sound support, x,y,z, the headaches, trials and tribulations you will go thru being "new to linux" just to get some stupid clock setup.
Don't bother. I'm almost certain you can get some sort of standalone commercial timer unit also. For much cheaper.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Forget cobbling up a Goldberg contraption. Go to your local marine store and buy some air power horns. Have the shop foreman blow the horns.
Honestly Linux is overkill, as is a full computer. Chances are, however, very good that speed of development is paramount - it doesn't have to work so good the first time, just make it work. Then we'll evaluate it and refine it.
.NET server, including every reasonable Linux/Unix/BSD solution you can come up with.
Therefore I'm going to stun, and yes, even shock, the slashdot crowd. I may be publicly skewered, but in the interest of your job and sanity:
Use DOS - 6.22 ought to work fine, but whatever you can find lying around will work. Make a simple QBasic program that has a simple interface, and makes simple sounds. It all fits onto one floppy disk, and runs under dos 3.x, through windows
Make it do simple beeps to the PC speaker and amplify it, or hook the parallel port up to a large bell or beeper. It'll fit on a single floppy, and will run on that old accounting computer no one wants to use.
If you want to have different sounds you can throw a sound card and hard drive in there and load a simple dos WAV player which won't take much CPU power. These can be called from Qbasic (or your language of choice - Turbo C 2 is free and comes with a useful IDE)
This project should take you an hour if you buy a PA system from Radio Shack. Your Boss will be impressed at your elite hacking skills, and you will be revered by workers across the factory floor.
And when you leave/get fired you can have it play "Who let the dogs out" or somesuch.
-Adam
Don't bother setting up a computer system and hacking something out. Instead, just use something like The Work Alerter, which is ready-made and allows up to 32 events. It even includes a speaker and you can set the duration of the sound from 1 to 99 seconds. It looks like additional speakers can be attached. It has a low cost of $389 and probably more reliable than hacking out a computer setup. Sometimes the right tool for the job is not Linux on a computer system.
(I'm not affiliated with them, it was just the first place listed in my search results.)
First, get one of those atomic clock receiver cards to keep the PC time right, then pick one of the dozens of scripts that will cover this page to do the work and output through a sound card to an amp and the existing speakers.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL