Marking Time - Controlling a Noisemaker from a PC? 33
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.
Better Solutions Than A Linux Box (Score:1)
Cron and PC Speaker/Sound Card.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:Cron and PC Speaker/Sound Card.... (Score:1)
Yeah, that's great until some wiseass replaces
Re:Cron and PC Speaker/Sound Card.... (Score:1, Offtopic)
What, no "+1, Funny"?
Re:Cron and PC Speaker/Sound Card.... (Score:2)
THIS post, by the way, IS off-topic.
The simplest method is always best. (Score:2)
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.
Re:The simplest method is always best. (Score:2)
how bout $30 plus shipping?
Re:The simplest method is always best. (Score:1)
I'm sorry for the off topic. Please dont mod me down, I have very little karma
Simple (Score:1)
I will assume that this is a large place.
Your going to have to install wiring for speakers and the speakers themselves (or whatever your favorite 110 decibel alarm system has.. >:) ). Make sure all the wiring terminates in the room with the computer.
If they are speakers, sure, that $50 amp at radioshack would prolly work. (louder if needed, but the point is the same). In this case, mpg123 or xmms would would perfectly. (provided no one has a playlist running
Of course, if your a hardware hacker, there are numerous ways to write simple C programs to interface with the printer port, and also corresponding eletronic kits that can be set up as computer controlled relays and such.
Of course, where you where wanting different sounds for different events ("everyone stand for the coporate anthem"), then the mp3 or a wav player hooked up to an amp would be much more versitile, cost about the same, and be a lot easier to set up.
I wrote a program to control a parallel port. (Score:1)
I wrote a program to control a parallel (printer) port. It's easy, in several languages. There are eight data lines, so you have eight outputs.
It is possible to buy power controllers that control 30 amps from an isolated 5 milliampere 5 volt input, which is perfect for controlling from a computer.
Correction and amplification: (Score:1)
My comment above is only relevant if you need a seriously loud siren. In many large factories, this is necessary, because speakers just don't make enough sound. The sirens run on AC power, and would need to be controlled from a PC port.
If you have a sound system that is loud enough to signal to everyone, it is better to use a PC sound card, and control that from a timer program, as someone has said above. An advantage of a sound system is that you can configure the sound easily, and you can use it for voice.
Here's how I've seen it done (Score:2, Informative)
The Easy Way (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Builtin windows software (Score:1)
Sounds a lot like my alarm clock... (Score:1)
As others have said, there's countless ways to do it, the simplest is to have a audio player play a file at a given time (or, for a schedualed event. IE, all shift changes have one sound, breaks another etc). Provideing your computer has a sound card in it, should be simple enough to hook it up to your PA system.
You have got to be joking... (Score:2, Insightful)
If that's all the computer is going to do... (Score:2)
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
Get The Work Alerter (Score:3, Insightful)
(I'm not affiliated with them, it was just the first place listed in my search results.)
Re:Get The Work Alerter (Score:2)
yeh a windows computer could do this just fine using software easily retrieved from download.com or any similar freeware site.
Re:Get The Work Alerter (Score:2)
I was building an LED flashlight for my 2-year-old that would turn off after about a minute because he sometimes leaves it on. I certainly didn't consider using a Linux machine.
Re:Get The Work Alerter (Score:1)
Thanks for the input so far from everyone though! :-)
First get the time right (Score:2)
do you really need this? (Score:1)
I know, I'm being idealistic and probably unrealistic, but it needs to be said, and there, I said it.
Good luck.
DB
Cron + mpg123 | play (Score:1)
If it was connected to the internet, you could even have cron make sure the time was correct to some atomic clock every now and then.