OT; varied security sounds needed

I would think you could kludge something from the audio greeting cards. Some allow you to record a message.

Dan

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0Dan

How about Bill Cosby's "SOMEONE'S AT THE DOOR!", or maybe "manos arribas!"

One thought is to have a series of wav files on your computer and a program to monitor your parallel port for inputs. Program runs in back ground and feeds verbal or tonal alarm to a speaker system depending on which input is active.

Wes

erbal or tonal

QBasic will do that but only for the data bits, Windows messes with the control bits. Later, more sophisticated languages know that you shouldn't be permitted hardware access. QBasic runs under NTVDM which uses 100% of the CPU.

I tweaked my 2003 Dell so the utility partition is available for QBasic. More recent Dells may have a backup of the OS in there but mine just has DellDiags and an autoexec that reboots when it exits.

QB will play single notes though not chords and you can write sounds and sequences that sound like 1980's video games. I use appropriate TV and film themes like Jaws, Dragnet, etc.

Before the Do Not Call list I had it playing the 3 note sequence that indicates an inactive number, which I practiced until I could whistle it into the phone.

Jim Wilkins

How about using a PIC to control different sound chips?

Now if you want a sound that NOBODY could ignore go find an older Super PASS II unit like we use in the fire service. 100+ db alarm with a high warbling tone that cuts through any background noise. They are basically an audio oscillator driving a two section piezo panel. I have used the audio section in a smoke alarm for my BIL (his daughter sleeps through normal detectors!)

If you are willing to do a little bit more work, there is a pretty good way to get up to 16 inputs or outputs in Windows based systems. A company named FTDI makes USB to serial/parallel adaptor chips. Their driver allows using the USB to dual UART chip as a 16 bit I/O port with library calls in C or C++ to access. Or with the standard Microslop C comm library, you can get 6 inputs and 4 outputs via the modem control lines. They make a neat little module with a USB connector on it and a

40 pin DIP footprint, so you don't need to mess with the surface mount parts. A little signal conditioning to protect the module and you have easy I/O access for modern operating systems. The modules are available from Mouser.

More on-topic to the original poster, we have a wireless phone that makes different animal noises for the ringer. I find the mallard quacking to be a lot less irritating than an electronic beeping.

BobH

See

Create your own custom sounds: glass breaking, loud fart, loon call, banshee shreik, etc etc --- or simple voice messages announcing the various events.

I have done this before using 555 timers to make oscillators of varioius frequencies - you get two of htem in a 556, and you can link so one modulates the other to get warbles - you can change frequencies and modulation easily - suggest looking at the app guide for the chip and then building up what you need - this chip is the most common of all ICs, as I recall, and it is extrememly cheap and useful

I dearly loved quickbasic. I still have QB4.5 on my machine. I must have deleted the copy of Visual basic for dos along the way.

Last month I licensed a copy of Emergince Basic from

. The op reminded me that I hadn't done anything with it. I've got a learning curve. Reading the parallel port can be done but I'll have to load a dll to do so. Something to play with next weekend. Everything is 10 times harder in windows. :(

Wes

Looked interesting, but 2 problems; I'd have to buy a lot of units, and I doubt the volume would be high enough. I need to hear it clearly in the next room.

Free men own guns - www(dot)geocities(dot)com/CapitolHill/5357/

Here's an integrated system that might do what you like:

's a inexpensive circuit, but it might not be "customizable" (no data sheet): sounds like you're perilously close living in an "arcade game." =83=BA

ogram to monitor

s verbal or tonal

Thanks. I was looking for something like that until I found the old Radio Shack serial port multimeter. What would you suggest for a free C development system? I can't even get started in Visual Studio.

Jim Wilkins

nick hull wrote: (...)

Voice Annunciator?

--Winston

Jim Wilkins wrote: (...)

Turbo C++ free download.

--Winston

[ ... ]

Well ... almost any unix (including linux and the various BSD flavors) come with a built-in development system. And most are free.

If you are talking about working in a Windows system, look at CygWin -- which puts a lot of unix tools into a Windows system, including the GNU C compiler (gcc).

Here is a web site which tells you how to do this:

It tells you to use notepad.exe instead of wordpad.exe, because the latter is likely to use rich text format, which can confuse things like the compiler.

However, I'll bet that one of the things which you can install from the menus shown in the site is "emacs", which is a much more powerful programming editor. (I actually use jove (Jonathon's Own Version of Emacs) -- a subset of emacs which does all that I need it to do for almost everything. I'm not sure whether it is in the cygwin suite of programs). I *do* keep emacs around for those other things. However, you will have to learn a new editor. If you already know and are comfortable with notepad.exe just go with it.

And gcc ia a very good and very powerful C/C++ compiler, which you can find on almost any unix system around the world. (It is also free, just as everything in the CygWin suite. :-) I've got a couple of versions of gcc, plus Sun's own "Studio 12" compiler suite on this unix box.

I hope that this helps, DoN.

You can store wave files on a SD card, and play different ones with a custom program using the Arduino board.

I use an old version of Visual Studio for stuff that runs under windows. I use it to build command line programs in straight C only and it is not bad for that and their debugger is pretty nice. Are you getting tangled up in the GUI stuff?

I use GCC for the unix and linux stuff. I have not tried the cygwin or GCC for windows. A long time ago, I used the Borland Turbo C and liked it a lot, but that was pre-windows.

BobH

And then there is Watcom C