Entertaining Alert Sounds

[eriond]

Recently, a request was forwarded to me for the following:
a customer has a twelve station warning system. The customer would like an audible sound, unique to each station. Each unique sound to be a SONG. When switch one is turned on, song 1 plays, switch 2..song 2, etc.. Oh yeah, this song needs to be played at a minimum of 60 dB. At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, I figured if anyone knew a way to make something like this a reality, if would be someone on this site. The system has a Allen-Bradley SLC 5/04 PLC. Any ideas? Thanks, in advance!

 

[DRWeig]

Hi Eriond,

It seems to me that Edwards Signal makes a horn that comes with selectable songs. Call 'em up. (Sorry, I'm not at my desk or I'd dig you out a number).

Another option is the dadgum doorbell my son bought at Home Depot. It's more like 70 db, and can be changed to cycle thru random songs by the season...

Good luck with it, and let me know what you find out!

Old Dave

 

[dpatddc]

Try

http://www.patlite.com/audible.htm

or Google "selectable audible alarms".

 

[jraef]

Federal Signal also makes a horn system with 32 or so programmable tones that does exactly what you are looking for. I used them at a brewery once to annunciate which part of a bottling line had a bottle jam. We even had FS program special tones that used the old Budweiser jingle. Everyone at the time knew the jingle by heart. When you heard only part of it play, you could tell roughly how far down the bottling line the problem was by knowing which part of the song it was!

http://www.federalsignal-indust.com/default.asp?pageID=4&lookup=2925

"Venditori de oleum-vipera non vigere excordis populi"

 

[robertjo24]

A little while back I experimented with a program called CoolSpeaking, which speaks what ever you type or copy to the clipboard. This program will also create .wav files of anything you type, and allow you to select different voices. I was experimenting using voice tags as alarm sounds for local control systems. Say you get a high current alarm on pump #1, instead of your control system giving a nondescript “DING” as an alert, I thought it would be useful to hear “High Current Alarm on Pump #1”. I stopped short when I realized the large number of alarms on our control systems.
If you have a reasonable number of alerts, this may be an interesting way of creating individual sound files for different alert conditions. You could drive them from a standard PC and turn up a set of multi-media speakers, or send to an amp for a loud speaker.
There are several text to speech programs available on the web if you are interested, some offering trial versions to test.