Need Door Bell generator for whole house audio

The Elk 930 is a "doorbell and telephone ring detector" module that with open-collector outputs that can be used as digital outputs or to control relays. Each module can be used for two doorbells and one phone line. Elk also has a variety of horns, chimes, and programmable and pre-programmed voice modules that interface directly (no relay needed).

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

I think Radio Shack has a 'ding dong' type piezo door bell element. Most every radio shack I've ever walked in to has it hooked up to their door announcer IR beam and when you walk in you hear it go ding dong ding (because the pulse from the IR beam to power the thing is longer than the ding-dong cycle of the piezo element.)

Anyway, since a piezo is just a speaker, I would go to RS, buy one of those, tear it apart, you'll probably see the two lead in wires that take 12VDC and they will go to a circuit board and from there it will probably have 2 wires going to the piezo. I have a hunch that if you just connect the two output wires to the paging input you will get the ding-dong. Now the only trick is to power it for the correct length of time. Probably using a 555 as a pulse stretcher would do it.

Hmm, on second thought, that may be more complex than you want to do. Well, that's the free advice I can think of right off the bat.

Good luck, let us know how you work it out!

How about a Niles DBI?

This should do the trick. It's an ELK recordable driver. The URL is on my website:

I used the page input on my audio system, an amplifier, and a Nutone Chime Module.The parts cost less than $50 and found the instructions on the

website. Just search the knowledgebase for "doorbell". You can also purchase the equipment from them. It works great.

The Nutone Solution looks great Patrick. Thanks for everyone's input.