Oh noes! Something’s not right! How can I let my dear colleagues know??
No worries: Just make some noise on channel 8, and the beacon will be lit!
How does this work of art function, you might ask? There are several approaches to getting a walkie talkie online
A good way to start is to search the interwebs if and see if what you’re trying to do is supported and done before. If not, you can try to reverse engineer the signal, or crack it open and work straight on the hardware.
Our preferred approach is a bit different:
A sound sensor is attached to a Wemos D1, which posts to the <emergency> topic on our MQTT queue running on our Azure VM. (Side note: none of the cloud providers had an IoT hub that met our standard for security ease of use, so we decided to roll our own.)
A different Wemos listens to this topic and triggers the beacon, calling Rohan to our aid.
(Note to self: remember to check the batteries of these guys once in a while, you never know when disaster strikes.)
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