Hello all, I have been trying to find out how to implement a simple and inexpensive voice capability on my Vera Lite so that in the event an alarm is triggered - e.g. Smoke Alarm or Front Door Unlocked, in addition to an email or text message, an alert is announced throughout the house. I finally have that installed and it is working wonderfully - here is how I did it: My initial intent was to install an Aeon Labs Gen5 Z Wave Doorbell. This device has 2 components: A Battery Powered Button (transmitter) which is installed outside and a plug in receiver which is plugged into any wall socket. It is this second unit which comes with 6 ringtones (all MP3 files) that proved to be the key to my audio messaging system. (an important note here - when installing this unit, the orientation of the transmitter unit is critical for the receiver to be activated - if you are not getting the bell to ring, try different orientations - I had to experiment and now it is working very well).
OK - so after everything was working well, I enrolled the doorbell unit onto Vera and verified that all was OK there.
My next step was to create message files. Using my PC I created as many messages as I needed (which included everything from nice salutations to loud Klaxon alarms), and saved each separately, in MP3 format. I then unplug my Doorbell receiver unit and connected it to my PC using the USB cable supplied. After the unit was recognized by the PC, I transferred all of the MP3 files that I had created to the receiver. Then with the file folder still opened on my PC, I sorted all of the files in that folder by DATE - and made a numbered list of their order with 1 being the oldest file. I then made sure that I properly dismounted the receiver from my PC so that files were not lost.
Then after plugging the receiver back into the wall at its original location, I opened Vera and in Devices found the Doorbell and under the advanced tab, wrote down the number that was on the AltID line - which I would have to use in the next step.
I then edited the Scene that I had created many months ago, where I wanted the voice message e.g. the scene that alerts me when the temperature in the house goes below 50 degrees, to be placed. I then went to the page in the Scene that allows me to enter an LUUP Code and pasted the following: luup.call_action(‘urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:ZWaveNetwork1’,‘SendData’,{Node=‘Y’,Data=‘112 4 6 1 X’},1)
I then substitute for X (on the line above), the number-serquence of the date-sorted MP3 and substituted for Y (in the line above) the AltID that I had recorded, in the previous step. For example if the Water Altert Message was the 8th file in the MP3 list and the AltID that I recorded was 35 … the above code looked like:
luup.call_action(‘urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:ZWaveNetwork1’,‘SendData’,{Node=‘35’,Data=‘112 4 6 1 8’},1)
That’s all there was to it - after I saved that Scene I tested the results and it worked perfectly! And so for the price of the Doorbell, I was able to implement a robust voice messaging system at no additional cost!