Re: Inject text alerts into a CATV system

There's one more possible solution. If you're not averse to opening up the TV set, you can wire a relay to open the speaker circuits (there are two) when the doorbell rings. There are inexpensive wireless doorbells that can be rigged to trigger a low current relay. Total project cost should be under $150.

I should have saved this for tomorrow but...

Have you considered animal assistants? They work cheap and, if you get tall dogs (e.g. Great Danes) that can eat off the counter, it also solves the feed/water problem.

Replace the TV, they're cheap these days. Otherwise, yeah, it'd be quite difficult to handle interrupting things effectively.

Also consider that on-screen messages might not get seen. Or they might not stay on-screen "long enough" to be read. If you have a Tivo you'll have seen how they handle messages. They're stacked up and the system interrupts you for the initial showing and then when you return to a menu. It might be interested to use that as a possible storage medium for messages like this...

Have you considered going even simpler? Put a reasonably bright light near the TV that is triggered by the doorbell and phone. You could even have different ones or different flash patterns for each source.

Getting a little fancier, somone else suggested killing the TV sound. If you do that, you could have the circuit latch so that the sound stays off until a button is pressed. That way he can answer the appropriate thing without the massive sound level and come back to it.

My mother likes the TV at a much louder level than some others do. I would consider setting something up with some sort of wireless speakers at the headrest on her favorite chair but there is the problem of getting power to it without the cord being a tripping problem.

"Robert L Bass" wrote in

I am beginning to like Lewis G's speaker suggestion. It ties in with a whole house audio system I've been envisioning for my folks. It's still in the planning stage because I'd like to incorporate VR into the system so it could query my Dad to make sure he's taken his meds, locked the door, etc. He's getting very forgetful as he ages, far more so than Mom. Right now the plan is to have dedicated "microphone stations" at the front door, the kitchen, the bathroom and the bedroom.

-- Bobby G.

The current minidog, a JackChi, can reach the nearly 4' counter in a single vertical leap. The problem is that if there's anything up there (and there usually is) she drags it down with her when she comes crashing to the ground. Rascal is litterbox trained. I am not sure that you can litterbox train a Dane or that you'd even *want* to. Little 5 pound Rascal can pound it out and whiz it out in prodigious quantities. I know. I've babysat for her. I'll bet a Dane could make a bigger dogpile than their current dog.

I'll bet the best way to lift all these platforms is hydraullically. The problem is that the noise of a diesel powered oil pump might become bothersome. :-)

-- Bobby G.

Lewis' idea sounds like a good solution. You could implement this using a DoorFon as the front end if you like. It replaces the doorbell button with what looks like a door intercom station. When the button is pressed the inside phones ring and a relay is thrown. Use the relay to interrupt the audio. The telephone ring sounds different from a normal call. Add a separate ring sensor to throw another relay and he won't miss incoming calls either.

A $25 timer (or an Ocelot or an ELK Magic Module if you prefer) can keep the TV / stereo muted for a preprogrammed time. Better and cheaper still, a latching DPDT relay can keep it muted until dad hits a button. Now he can hear incoming calls and the doorbell. Whether he will actually answer them remains to be seen though at least the doorbell sound will be distinguished from a phone call.

The DoorFon relay can trigger his existing doorbell sound as well as mute the TV and ring the phone if you like.

I once saw a cat that had been trained to use the toilet. Training the cat to do it was interesting because they really like to go in the litter box. The cat's person placed some kind of stretchy cellophane over the toilet bowl (lid up) and poured some clean litter into the center. The cat would do its business standing on the edge of the bowl. How she got the cat to start is anybody's guess. After a while the woman added less and less litter and left a greater and greater depression in the plastic. Eventually she did away with the cellophane and litter and the cat would simply drop it's waste into the toilet.

Robert L Bass wrote: snip

When I was much younger and had just gotten out of the USAF, I moved to my parents home temporarily. About the third day I was home, I came back to the house about 1:30 AM to find 10 or 15 various police and sheriffs cars gathered on my parents block in Palos Verdes Estates in the southwestern part of Los Angeles county. Being a curious sort I asked what was going on, when an officer stopped me from going to the house. I was told that there had been another sighting of a black panther, that had been reported several times earlier. He allowed me to proceed to the house, and when I had parked in the drive, I noticed one of the neighbors standing out at the street a couple of doors up the street, so I walked up to see what he knew.

I noticed that he seemed unusually agitated, so I asked if I could help him. He said that he was worried that one of the neighbors had seen his pet cat and called the authorities. I commented that seemed a little far fetched. But then he took me in and showed me his 300 pound mountain lion. That tame cat acted like a well behaved pet dog, but when I commented that I wouldn't want to cleanup it's cat box, he showed me how that cat used the toilet. I had forgotten that incident until Robert's tale. So, I'll believe Robert this time. By the way; they did kill the panther about 2 weeks later and someone did eventually report my neighbor's illegal mountain lion.

Gee, thanks for the confidence.

So how did you end up in Fresno from Palos Verdes Estates? Most migration paths go in the other direction.

I lived >When I was much younger and had just gotten out of the USAF, I moved to

Jim answered Dave: My wife and I decided in 1981 to take some real estate profits and flee the LA area with our young family. We both were working for our own computer consulting firm and thought we could do OK outside of the smog and we knew the kids would.

We moved to a mountain home about 55 miles east of Fresno that you could actually locate by drawing a straight line on a forest service map between Yosemite and Sequoia National park headquarters and then dividing that line into two equal pieces. We lived on the mountain until we found that the kids education was suffering in the very small schools available.

Now that the kids are gone, well sortof, we can't go back up on the mountain because of my COPD. All that LA smog and my smoking caught up with me. My wife is still working as a teacher (Computer Info Systems) at Fresno City College and does not plan to retire for at least another

Ahh, yes. California Real Estate was bubbling back then. I knew someone who retired to Tahoe on his real estate profits at the ripe old age of 30. I left in late 1979 after commuting to Chicago for a couple of months.

That would have been back in CPM and very early DOS days.

OK. That makes a lot more sense than a direct move to Fresno.

I was right on the beach in Long Beach (#1 Third Place). In those days, it was about the only area that was free of smog because the prevailing winds were from offshore except for the Santa Ana in the fall. I was out of town