[K12OSN] Linux Bell system

[Keith Olson]

Jim Kronebusch wrote:

>>So you are using cron to schedule bells and delivering the sound 
>>(tones) via your in house intercom system - YES ?  Very smart.   How 
>>did the intercom interface go ?  Any really old systems ?  You can 
>>control alternate schedules and even fire drills and stuff YES ?
>>    
>>
>
>Looks like I was missing one piece.  I now added a daily restart of crond
>after running the script to swap cron jobs.  I also am now adding more stuff
>to play different start of day sounds (such as announcing todays schedule) and
>different end of day sounds (say laughter and jubilation).
>
>I wired an 1/8th male audio jack to a 3 prong male microphone jack and plugged
>the microphone jack to our receiver for our intercom system.  So now the
>computer is simply another microphone on the system.  Whichever cron schedule
>is set for the day plays the selected audio tone over the intercom system.  I
>can now simply SCP any audio file over to the system and play it on demand as
>well at the command line with "play /path/to/audiofile".  This will be fun.  
>
>Using the task scheduler from webmin makes a nice gui way to automate the
>scripts ahead of time as well.
>
>Never thought of using this for fire drills, I don't know what kind of rules
>there are for that but I imagine this would have to be tied into the fire
>sensing system and manual alarm boxes to be of code.
>
>I hope the scripts and stuff above help.  Let me know if you have any other
>questions.
>
>  
>
*Please* tell me that you have it secured against unauthorized access.  
I know how much fun /I/ would have had with unrestricted access to the 
P.A. system. <EG>

-- 
Keith Olson
K-Soft Consulting