ECC Forum

An interesting feature of the BCS-460 is the ability to customize your alarm. Alarms can be any mp3 that you choose, and can be triggered by any state transition. This can be very useful to alert you when your target temperature is reached, or for a hop addition process. Thanks to Zulu for suggesting this feature during the beta testing, and np0x for the implementation.

To update the alarm, enter the path to your mp3 in the System Settings page. The mp3 has to be accessible from the network. Then enable it to play whenever your state hits an exit condition in the Add/Edit State Machines page.

My current alarm is "Adam's Song" by Blink 182, athough it changes every session.
"http://www.embeddedcontrolconcepts.com/tmp/Blink 182 - Adam's Song.mp3"

What's yours?

is there any "extra" memory on the BCS to support just a SMALL mp3 (1-2k ish) for a beeping and a repeat until cleared window popup? Rather than pulling an mp3 from a URL location?

Yeah, there is a default alarm called "./alarm_clock.mp3" which is already programmed into the controller. Its a short recording of your standard bedroom alarm clock. You can set it to play in two modes, 'Short' - about 6 seconds, or 'Loop Until Cancel' - until you press the Alarm Off button on the main control page.

Currently there is no way to upload an alarm to the device. If you want to change it, it has to be accessible from the network.

is there any "extra" memory?

Adam should really speak to this, but when you and I think about memory and space, the units and scale have no relationship to the available memory on the bcs. The device has a total of 256Kbytes memory for the firmware and 64Kbytes for RAM, so the coding of the device is one in which every character counts eventually. Compressing single digit K files has been a worthwhile action on the device. Memory is um, not really every extra...one of the first things done during the beta testing was find extra memory on the device. I would be happy to put a bunch of royalty free sounds on a public web server for people to play against, if there was interest for those people that do not have a webserver available. Of course, no commercial music please.