Very-OT - Plant Whistles/Bells

How big is your plant? We had a system that runs off of a lighting/irrigation timer and that worked mostly okay, but lazy me ended up replacing it with a Raspberry PI that triggers the relay that drives the bell. When we'd switch to our summer schedule I could never remember how to change the settings on the old timer.

It's got a 24VAC power supply that drives the bell and then is converted to 5VDC for the Pi.

We've got a smaller area where I did what Todd basically did and output the Raspberry Pi to some speakers, as the bell would be a little loud for such a small area. Same concept though were I'm just using crontab to schedule the rings.
Does anyone have automated bells or whistles in their plant to alert the
employees for breaks, lunches, shift changes, etc? If so, assuming you are
happy with it, what do you use?



TIA.







Vic Drecchio

Director of IT

Swepco Tube, LLC

One Clifton Blvd, Clifton, NJ 07011

Office Direct: (973) 272-1379

Email: vic.drecchio@...









[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Ages ago I put a small USB sound card on a server (does not matter which really as long as it has a NTP time source).  Then set up a scheduled task to play a small 3 second 800Hz sound file.  I used a freeware player (can’t recall the name) that spun up very fast and closed itself when done.  Then the output from the sound plug mini-jack was wired to the background music input of our paging systems plant zone (since we did not use background music).  Only downside was the rare case where a page was being made at exactly a shift or break time the page overrode the tone.  Otherwise it worked very well for 15 years and is probably still working.  Cheap and reliable.

-Todd C.

 

 

From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 2:50 PM
To: 'Vantage Yahoo'
Subject: [Vantage] Very-OT - Plant Whistles/Bells

 

 

Does anyone have automated bells or whistles in their plant to alert the
employees for breaks, lunches, shift changes, etc? If so, assuming you are
happy with it, what do you use?

TIA.

Vic Drecchio

Director of IT

Swepco Tube, LLC

One Clifton Blvd, Clifton, NJ 07011

Office Direct: (973) 272-1379

Email: vic.drecchio@...

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]