A random thought popped into my mind tonight as I was working on a project and I wondered…how hard would it be for the Vera to pick up on Emergency Alert System activity and if something were ever to happen, have it send a command to all squeezeboxes (or whatever solution someone uses) so an audible command can be announced in the house including the alert?
This is a UK system - right? On second thoughts - perhaps its a Chinese setup?
My thought involves the US emergency alert system.
Some details:
When I first bought Vera I looked into writing some LUA code utilizing the Weather Underground plug-in (e.g. Tornado*; *=Warning/Watch etc.). In my case, I have a school nearby and when the sirens go off there’s no way I’d overlook the warning. Regardless, this would be great for the hearing impaired (flash the lights) assuming something doesn’t already exist or as you indicated, play a WAV/MP3 instructing the kids to go (enter location here) assuming mom and dad aren’t home (geo-fence).
Lots of possibilities…
[quote=“CudaNet, post:4, topic:177451”]When I first bought Vera I looked into writing some LUA code utilizing the Weather Underground plug-in (e.g. Tornado*; *=Warning/Watch etc.). In my case, I have a school nearby and when the sirens go off there’s no way I’d overlook the warning. Regardless, this would be great for the hearing impaired (flash the lights) assuming something doesn’t already exist or as you indicated, play a WAV/MP3 instructing the kids to go (enter location here) assuming mom and dad aren’t home (geo-fence).
Lots of possibilities…[/quote]
Absolutely. The other day the whole thing came to mind when I was talking to my room mate about a few things on the system and I started come up with new ideas on what it should be able to do in the near future, and that was one of them. I thought…imagine walking through your house and all a sudden the alarm goes off and the squeezebox announces a Tornado warning…or Volcanic activity…or unsafe/dangerous air quality alert (which could also be from volcanic activity…or an attack or various other scenarios).
I have a playful scene on the vera that triggers the squeezebox to speak out a fictional warning (it was for when my younger siblings came over to visit) that claimed that there has been a national zombie outbreak and all residents are urged to keep inside at all times, to board up the windows and always shoot twice (etc etc). At first they fell for it until they caught on and thought it was a fun joke and couldn’t stop giggling about it.
As I was coming up with ideas, that scene came to mind and led me to think about function uses of such a feature if the plugin existed.