Open School Bell

Open School Bell is still under development and has not been tested with widespread use.

Open School Bell is an open-source solution to provide a modern school bell system. It not only provides a way to schedule bells but also to broadcast to the sounders, enabling effective mass-communication within your school. On top of that it contains a full-featured lockdown system.

Overview

What you’ll be getting

  • Network based bell scheduling.
  • Any audio file as a bell.
  • On-demand triggering of audio files.
    • Ideal as a Lockdown alarm within school.
    • Quick distrobution allows for use as a tannoy system.
  • Active monitoring of the sounders.

What you’ll need

  • A server (could be one of your sounders) to run the docker container for the controller.
  • A Raspberry Pi to run the agent, per area of school.
  • An amplifier you can plug your Pi into.
  • A speaker wherever you want a bell wired back to the amplifier.

You could also

  • Connect a relay to the GPIO Pins on a Raspberry Pi to an existing ringer wire so Open School Bell can run your existing bells alongside RPi sounders.
  • Connect a touch screen to one of your sounder Pis and use it as a Lockdown Screen

How you’ll set it up

  • Run the controller through docker, either on a server or on one of the sounder Pis.
  • Run the sounder agent on a Pi.
  • Connect the Pi to an amplifier.
  • Mount speakers on the walls, or in the ceiling of the area you want to cover.
  • Run a speaker cable from the amplifier through all the speakers in the area.
  • Configure your bell schedule on the controller.
  • Done!