Mundane Gadget Spam of the Day: Teradon School Bell Controller
From the sewer that is my inbox:
Teradon Industries, which adds scare quotes around "smart solutions" in its own motto, would very much like you to consider buying an institution-class intercommunications system.
Its system allows school staff to set bells from the computer station, play a school song, control the building's announcement system, and summon pteranodons.
Set your bells with tones from a computer. Have your School Song for the bell to begin the school day. Change your schedule from your computer. Time is corrected automatically from the Internet. You never have to change time on the bell system again. Intercom system programming can be monitored remotely. Make room calls and announcements from your telephone or master handset. Schools can now manage and control their intercom system. No more costly service bills and waiting for service.
Product Page [Teradon]
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All right.
That's one item down on my list of things to get for the "institution of learning" I'm building with various things purchased from spam mails.
Not only do you empty you inbox sewer on us, Rob, you also messed up the link. (Yes, I am so lame I actually went to look at the school bell controller site). :)
Of course, the password will still be taped on a piece of paper under the laptop a la War Games.
http://www.teradon.com/
ENH!
I must have been born lame... or autistic. Because I have quite vivid memories of how the bells and classroom clocks were set "by hand" in each room using a standard "structured wiring" (e.g. lightswitch / AC electricity socket sized) keypad on the wall, and trying to observe how the teacher configured it when changes were required. I also remember how my high school had some kind of centralized wiring so that all the clocks in all the classrooms would agree by calibrating them every hour or so... and I could hear the mechanical spinning inside as the clocks were frozen in time or sped up to match whatever "official" time in the school was.
Anyway, http://www.zettadon.com/ ... 1000x the -don, baby. :p
School song for this morning will be... Inagaddadavida."Time is corrected automatically from the Internet. You never have to change time on the bell system again. Intercom system programming can be monitored remotely. Make room calls and announcements from your telephone or master handset."
This brings up some very funny possibilities for pranks. Perhaps it could be rigged up to have the bell ring every five minutes.
What? WHAT?
Astonishment aside, let me try to understand this... They are selling what amounts to a Linux box with Asterisk, cron, and ntp. Does it need to be larger than a laptop, or is that case what makes it 'institution-class'? Maybe that's where they keep the pteranodon ptortal.
Well, OK, so Linux can't yet summon pteranodons... but I bet there's a ptython module for pthat.
Actually I don't think it is laptop size or indeed even a laptop on that unit. That appears to be a half-height server rack with a 1U console drawer.
It appears that you get a *nix box with all of the software that CERTRON posted but in a unit the size of a large bar fridge. Probably way more power than you need, or possibly way less power in a really big box so you feel better about wasting the probably tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to get something that a desktop grade unit could do easily.
You could probably even do this with a Gumstix-like unit and hide it so that it is less likely to be messed with.
People like their blinky lights though, so this product may very well sell.
A school intercom story because I should be working instead of passing notes to BoingBoing:
About 7 years ago a friend and I went to a demolition sale at a local catholic girls school. While I was rummaging around for religious artifacts my friend was mesmerized by the school intercom system. It was setup on a couple of sawhorses after having been yanked out of its wall mounting. The thing had a big streamlined 50's look and was about 5'x2'x2'. The front panel had a radio, rows and rows of flip switches for the intercom, an enormous microphone and a 45 turntable.
He had to have it.
$100 dollars later we were lugging the absurdly heavy gadget out to his truck.
He still has it. He is absolutely convinced he will someday get it working and connected to his home sound system, intercoms and all. True gadget love is like that.
These things are a pain in the ass. I used to work for a school district in Texas that bought these mounds of crap. They say they interface with the phone system, but it took months in order to get the school's Mitel phone system to play nice with it. And who uses a dinosaur bird as a mascot for their BELL CONTROL company?!
@#10: But of course.