Alert Users When Door Is Opened

rosco

Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2000
Messages
722
We are looking for a way to have an alert show on 6 computers when someone goes through an automatic sliding door next to an office area. The idea would be a little popup window in the lower right corner of their screen that just pops up when someone goes through and then goes away.

Do you guys have any idea how to accomplish that?
 
I don't have a solution that works off the top of my head, but I'm interested to see what possible methods are.

Spitballing: How is the automatic door triggered? Do you know the electrical layout of the automatic door? I could see splitting the trigger signal out that initiates the door-open, but then you'd need a way to input this into a computer/multiple computers; that's the tough part on a regular computer. It would be simple to use a RaspberryPi to do something upon receipt of the trigger signal on one of its inputs, but distributing that to 6 other computers in real time would be a bit more difficult. I wouldn't know how to generate a pop-up window on 6 different computers using that method, as each computer would need a bit of software to monitor this. It would be trivial to light up a LED next to the computer (from the RPi signal) using the GPIO on the Pi when the door actuates. But I don't know how to do this in software. Maybe you could dump the signal from the RPi into a serial port on the computer, and then have a script that initiates a window upon receipt of the RS232 behavior.

I'm sure there's got to be commercial software for something like this, but I don't know what it would be (or how much it would cost)
 
I like how you consider the software to be the hard part teh_chem. When I read the problem I was thinking the complete opposite. You could gin up a .NET application that listens for a broadcast message on the LAN and displays as a popup balloon pretty quickly. The hard part from my perspective would be the part that actually generates the message (i.e. interfacing with the door).
 
Just point a cheap webcam at the door and have a simple AutoIt script detect any changes, same AutoIt script could also alert those 6 computers over network.

Could be up and running same day, at the price of a webcam.
 
I like how you consider the software to be the hard part teh_chem. When I read the problem I was thinking the complete opposite. You could gin up a .NET application that listens for a broadcast message on the LAN and displays as a popup balloon pretty quickly. The hard part from my perspective would be the part that actually generates the message (i.e. interfacing with the door).

Ha! Well, I've always gotten hardware. Higher-level software, not so much. :) Guess that's what helps in asking a wide audience!

OP, what sort of budget are you looking at, what amount of complication, and how robust does this need to be, and did you want it to be a DIY project, or is something like what MrGuv posted what you're looking for (ought to have asked that in my previous post)?
 
My home automation system can do this. May be more than you want though, I use homeseer witha z-troller and door contacts to send alerts or kick off scripts.
 
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