Connecting to a Ringer Wire

Legacy Bell systems often use a Ringer Wire where a Normally Open wire runs to every bell and when you close the connection the bell rings. It’s the simpliest way to run a bell and in a lot of cases a simple switch is in place to manually ring the bell.

If you have a bell that can be operated by closing a connection then OSB can become your bells controller through the use of the GPIO pins on the Pi and a relay.

Configuring the Sounder

Edit the sounder on the controller to set the ringer pin to the GPIO pin connected to your relay.

You can find the GPIO Pin Number for the controller using cat /sys/kernel/debug/gpio. If using GPIO17 on a Pi5 the pin number is 588, gpio-588 (GPIO17)

Configuring the Audio

When editing an audio file there is an option for ringerWire. This option needs to be set to a comma seperated list of durations. ON,OFF e.g. 1,3 which would be on for 1 second, off for 3. It is highly reccomended that you include the off time so that if the sound is repeated a gap is left before the next on switch, although the sounder will always return the pin to off after any rings.

Not every audio file needs a ringerWire, for example tannoy annoucements would be a little redundant as rings on the bell.