Good evening, SF. Vthoky's here with questions again.

I'm working on a system to monitor a group of industrial ovens, essentially watching for a "gross overtemperature" condition. For monitoring and display, I'm using a small PLC and a touch-screen HMI, "watching" outputs from the individual oven controllers; both are Ethernet-enabled.

What I want next is a device that can make a phone call if that gross overtemperature condition occurs. The Maple Systems HMI I'm using can send a message to an email or text address, and that's a good start. Murphy's Law, however, says that a text or an email will go entirely unnoticed when an oven pukes at 2am. But if I can have the system ring some phones, then perhaps I can gather the necessary attention.

I've purchased a device called IP Auto Dialer (Amazon), and I'm having a devil of a time communicating with it to even get it set up. After dorking with it off and on for nearly three days now, I'm almost to the point of trying to find another device. (Unless someone here has this device in use and can help me.)

In its simplest sense, I'm looking for a device than can ring some phones and deliver a message upon receiving a signal from the PLC. I can provide that signal by way of simple contact closure, or by voltage input pulse. An Ethernet-based device seems ideal, as cellular service around our area sorta stinks.

Who's got the knowledge? I know it's around here somewhere! Thanks, all.

I would look for an automatic dialer made to work with an alarm system. Then, if possible, I'd hook it to a POTS line for reliability.

Maybe something like these:

https://www.securityproductsol...ic-alarm-dialer.html

Thank you, Some Shot. I appreciate your feedback.

Interestingly, the web site for the dialer I picked up shows it being used with an alarm system... and the paperwork that came with it strictly warns not to use it in systems to alert of danger. (Haha... sort of.)

Oh, and I don't have a POTS line available at this location.

You may want to look at the Google Voice and Google Programming APIs. I've done a very little bit of dabbling with Raspberry PIs and API interfaces. But if you can code, you can most like create something that would work.

I think what you are looking for is 2 fold, 1) send an alert to a "list of people" (I'll use list loosely because they could be: voice call, SMS, or e-mail) about the threshold. 2) Acknowledge that alert and stop calling.

I'm open for a discussion and my e-mail is in my profile.

That's a neat thought... I have a Pi on my desk at work, but haven't made time to learn to program it yet. One of our design fellas is Pi-fluent; I'll ask him about it tomorrow. The booger may be in getting a Pi onto the network -- I'm picturing the corporate IT guys having a bit of a hemorrhage about that, citing security. (My team is working on a plan to put a second network in place, but that's going to be a long time in the works).

Your two-fold thought is correct, pretty much. In its simplest sense, I want the device to send an alert to a list of "people." I can do some programming for "cascading alerts" in the PLC if necessary. Essentially, send an alert to "group 1" and start a timer. If nobody comes to "press the acknowledge button" within x minutes, then a second alert gets sent to "group 2," and so forth. It's likely, though, that under the conditions we intend to monitor, I think this will be a one-alert system: everybody who can possibly handle the problem would be in the single "group." All hands on deck when the call goes out, so to speak.

Thank you for the offer. I'll email you shortly.