Thinking back to the old empeg towers, I remember an IP Doorbell being discussed.

I have just wired out most of the house with Cat5e, even up to the door bell and alarm (more to do with having spare cable than anything else) and it got me thinking about how cool it would be to have an IP Doorbell.

The trouble is I don't have a clue where to start. I will have a couple of PC's in the "Server Cupboard" running XP Pro (for music/video and CCTV) and everything is wired back to there. I am using this Spore doorbell button.

I will have a couple of Rio Recievers around the house, as welll as Tivo and WiFi to the PDA and several PC's, it would be really cool if a message pops up on all these devices when the doorbell is pressed (and maybe CLi when the phone rings???).

Anyone hae any solutions to this ???

Cheers

Cris.

Now, this would be nice interfacing-and-networking case study, if you are in the mood to undertake such a thing.

First, you have to deliver one bit of information (pressed/not pressed) your door bell button is capable of to something a bit more cerebral. Since you probably won't want to buy a dedicated digital I/O board fro one of PCs just for this, perhaps you can use one of handshaking lines on a serial or parallel port for this. If the button has only one set of contacts, you will have to isolate the 'input port' from the actual bell circuitry via a relay, optocoupler or something like that.

Next, you will have to build a piece of SW that monitors that one-bit I/O port. Probably the clenest thing would be to write a driver, but I don't know absolutely nothing about Windows device drivers, and very little about drivers elsewhere, so I would stay in userland. The problem is, I am not sure whether XP lets userland apps to access bare metal in any way. Somebody else will have to fill in here.

Assuming we found a way to let a piece of program know the state of out bell port, we have to think of a way to let your numerous devices know about is. Here we have several approaches:

We can have XP run a trivial server that will, when contacted on a specific UDP/IP or TCP/IP port say 'yes' or 'no', and devices will run programs that will poll that port and pop a message when an interesting event occurs. Of course, we can avoid polling by having a (semi-)permanent TCP connection from each 'client', but then our 'server' has to be multithreaded or spawn a process for every connection.

It can be other way around: clients run little processes listening on a port, and central XP simply broadcasts a message on that port when somebody rings.

How to write client programs is another cup of tea. I know how to do it on 'normal' OSes (Windoze or Linux, say), so empegs, presumably receivers and TiVos should not be a problem. For PDAs, it depends on OS, but I think it should be doable. Anyway, any device more exotic than, say, empeg will pose its ow challanges (in starting the client SW, handling the message display etc).

Ah, yes, there is another approach: I believe there are little boxes available (I will try and look them up) with a couple of assorted I/O ports and ethernet, running a rudimentary web server. That eliminates XP device drivers problem, and the rest is similar.

All in all, nice excercise! Good luck!

Right Cris, I accept your challenge. Do you want me write some code for you?

I should be able to knock something up fairly easily. How is your doorbell connected, is it a simple closing contact with a separate LED?

The obvious extension to all this, now that you've got a user interface outside of your house, is to get an IP-controlled door lock. Then you could program a sequence into the doorbell controller to unlock the door. That would be cool.

beyondlogic.org seems to be a very good resource. Bookmarked. Thanks!

Pitty I don't currently have time to play with these nice toys. Well, one day...

Cris, for writing a device driver for your XP box so that you can use parallel post as an interface to your dell switch see this article on the site Michael found.

You could even set it up to understand morse code and have username/password combos for your front door. So when your girlfriend storms off, you can revoke her privileges.

LOL