rrw@naucse.cse.nau.edu (Robert Wier) (12/14/90)
In article <15381@accuvax.nwu.edu>, William.Degnan@f39.n382.z1. fidonet.org (William Degnan) writes: > One of the toys with which I have played is the Sensaphone. When I > worked for an interconnect company, we sold some for vacation homes. > The homeowner could select four (I believe) telephone numbers, which > are called in sequence until somebody calls the unit back to > acknowledge the voice message. Heathkit (if they are still in business when you read this - one wonders). Sells a unit very similar to this. I have one in my house in Colorado (at 8000' in the winter, it gets COLD!). It monitors and alerts on high temp, low temp, excessive noise, power off, and include a connection to an alarm system. It will dial out up to four numbers to give an alert. My major gripe is that it's not remotely programmable. So, if I close up my house in September, and don't get back till Christmas I can't make any changes. The first winter I used it (last winter) I THOUGHT I was going to leave the heat on at 55 degrees. However, propane (my fuel) went up in price from about 82 cent/gal to $1.40 cents/gal, so I decided to shut the house down (off furnace, drain pipes, etc). Forgot to reprogram the low temp setting before I left. It was calling my real estate agent, insurance agent, et al. Finally just had to have them go over and shut the thing off. This winter, I have it on the line, but programmed NOT to call out. I periodically check it to make sure things are still working. It doesn't give the same security as the call out feature, but not being remotely programmable, it looks like the best compromise for now. The Heath units (not a kit - already assembled) run around $140 and are HARD to get - I had to place a backorder for about three months. If anyone knows of a similar unit which is remotely programmable and at a reasonable cost, I'd be very interested. Thanks, Bob Wier insert favorite standard disclaimers here College of Engineering Northern Arizona University / Flagstaff, Arizona Internet: rrw@naucse.cse.nau.edu | BITNET: WIER@NAUVAX | WB5KXH or uucp: ...arizona!naucse!rrw
john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) (12/15/90)
Robert Wier <rrw@naucse.cse.nau.edu> writes: > In article <15381@accuvax.nwu.edu>, William.Degnan@f39.n382.z1. > fidonet.org (William Degnan) writes: > > One of the toys with which I have played is the Sensaphone. > My major gripe is that it's not remotely programmable. It does have a couple of other drawbacks. It is rotary dial only, the "acknowledgement" comes, not from the callee entering TT, but from him calling the unit right back after being called. Being called by one of these units was quite a treat, which reminds me of an amusing incident I had with one. The Sensaphone monitored temperature, ambient sound level, if the AC was on, and a two sets of contacts. None of these conditions could be "bypassed". You could set ridiculous temperature limits and you could bypass the contacts, but the built-in microphone was nasty. I set one of these things up in my living room behind my left speaker. I put four numbers in it to call friends, but hadn't informed them of this device yet. The next day, during a Shostakovich symphony the my phone kept ringing. Finally, I couldn't ignore it any longer. It was my business partner (at the time) who asked how I was enjoying my music. It seems the Sensaphone was triggered by the stereo system and called the list, announcing to all that "the sound level is HIGH", and then played a fifteen second realtime sample. At least that was amusing. What my friends didn't seem to think was funny was the 3:30 AM call announcing that "the power is OFF"! That thing soon found its place in a big box in the garage. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@bovine.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !
mao@postgres.berkeley.edu (Mike Olson) (12/16/90)
In <15409@accuvax.nwu.edu>, Bob Weir notes that environmental monitors like the Sensaphone are not remotely programmable. I am moving out of the domain of telecom, here, but thought you might be interested in a solution I have used to this problem. We used a Sensaphone in a computer room that had to be online for about 48 hours at the end of every month to print bills and paychecks. During the 48 hours, a sequence of programs ran on a tight timeline -- they took about 45 hours to run, so any delays were a major problem. We bought a Sensaphone, pulled the speaker out of a terminal connected to one of our computers, and wrote a daemon program that would watch the active process table and compare it to a list that we prepared of what should be going on at any time. The speaker wires were connected to one of the three "external alarm sensor" inputs on the Sensaphone. If anything funny happened, the daemon program would ring the terminal bell, the Sensaphone would trigger, and the operations staff would get woken up by the Sensaphone's voice synthesizer reporting that ALARM CONDITION ONE EXISTS ALARM CONDITION ONE EXISTS. We could generally dial up and fix whatever was broken (although groggy naked programmers making software changes to production code at 3AM did give my boss the screaming heebie-jeebies). For under a hundred bucks, this Rube Goldberg solution was a major win. We went from an average of 1.5 days late to 0.5 hours early with the end of month-end processing. Granted, we didn't make the Sensaphone itself remotely programmable, but with a cheap computer and a screwdriver you can pull off some pretty remarkable things. Mike