Servant Bell Board

[Nick Mace]

This is a very random tech talk type question (but so far away from westfields that I've put it in stuff and nonesense).

I have an old servant's bell board which was once used in our house - when someone pushes the button in a room, a bell sounds and a flag appears in one of the half a dozen windows on the board.  Unfortunately the glass panel is broken and I plan to get a copy made so we can put the thing up on the wall somewhere - it's part of the house's history so it seems a shame for it to be languishing in the garage as it is at the moment.

I then got to thinking whether I could get it working again...  I don't have any servants but I can dream of pushing the button and someone coming along to take my order for a fresh beer.

Some of the rooms still have the buttons on the walls but I expect the wiring will have long since perished (I've no idea where it would even go to as I don't know where the bell board was originally).  Getting the house re-wired for this would be a step too far(!) and so I started wondering whether I could do something wireless.  The idea would be to have a (small battery powered) wireless button in each room with a wireless receiver in/near the bell board which triggers the right flags.

Is this possible for someone with no real electronics skills to achieve or should I forget about it and find something more useful to do?

[Mark (smokey mow)]

How many flags are you looking to switch? If it's only a couple you could probably do it with a pair of wireless door bells if they're running on different frequencies? 

[Alan France]

You could achieve that with multiple Google Home Mini units and then use voice commands for a beer.

... that’s how it works with our servants, sorry you’ve had to let yours go!

[Nick Mace]

3 minutes ago, Mark (smokey mow) said:

How many flags are you looking to switch? If it's only a couple you could probably do it with a pair of wireless door bells if they're running on different frequencies? 

I think the board has half a dozen flags, but if I could get two or three working cheaply by butchering wireless doorbell kits then that would be worth looking into. Thanks

Of course I’m really hoping that @Kit Car Electronics will see this as a new side line and come up with the “servant freewheel” equivalent...

[Kevin Wood]

It could certainly be done. Might be a nice Arduino project if you have ever thought of having a dabble.

I also like the idea of pressing a button for beer.

I suspect getting the bell board to work would be the easy (and less painful) part of achieving this.

[Kevin Wood]

1 hour ago, Nick Mace said:

Of course I’m really hoping that @Kit Car Electronics will see this as a new side line and come up with the “servant freewheel” equivalent...

Well, looks like he has all the hardware required... Just needs some custom firmware.

[Nick Mace]

21 minutes ago, Kevin Wood said:

It could certainly be done. Might be a nice Arduino project if you have ever thought of having a dabble.

I also like the idea of pressing a button for beer.

I suspect getting the bell board to work would be the easy (and less painful) part of achieving this.

Arduino/raspberry pi crossed my mind, but a work colleague also mentioned sonoff which looks interesting. There seems to be a 4 channel low voltage version which might work. I’d need to do something at the push button end but he mentioned that a “flic” switch might help with that.

I definitely need to see if the electrics in the board work first...

[Lyonspride]

19 hours ago, Nick Mace said:

Arduino/raspberry pi crossed my mind, but a work colleague also mentioned sonoff which looks interesting. There seems to be a 4 channel low voltage version which might work. I’d need to do something at the push button end but he mentioned that a “flic” switch might help with that.

I definitely need to see if the electrics in the board work first...

 

The Sonoff is ESP8266 based and primarily used for it's WiFi capabilities, without the WiFi it's not much different to Arduino, it's programmed using the Arduino IDE too.

If you need WiFi and your trying to do something more custom (ie not just using it as a WiFi switch), then I would suggest not using Sonoff and using an ESP8266 dev board instead..... Like the CH340 NodeMcu V3, which is a bare bones ESP8266 PCB, powered by USB, but all the GPIO pins are available for whatever you want. The have more flash memory than Sonoff and are easier to flash custom firmware to, as iTead/Sonoff tried to stop people changing out their firmware, because they want people to DL their app with all it's invasive permissions.

They're cheap too, you can get 5 of them for the price of one Sonoff Basic, then all you need is some generic relay or SS relay modules, which are again very cheap.

I've got Sonoff switches and i've ended up modifying them and changing them to my own custom Firmware, to the point where buying Sonoff has ended up seeming pointless. One of them I removed the relay, so that I could switch low voltages, because on Sonoff the relays are connected to mains permanently.

Horses for courses and all that.

 

[Hemsley]

Jeeves, resurrect this thread for me please.

 

On 07/03/2018 at 17:34, Nick Mace said:

Arduino/raspberry pi crossed my mind, but a work colleague also mentioned sonoff which looks interesting. There seems to be a 4 channel low voltage version which might work. I’d need to do something at the push button end but he mentioned that a “flic” switch might help with that.

I definitely need to see if the electrics in the board work first...

 

Hi Nick, did you complete your bell box project? I retrieved this system from my old house and plan to bring it up to date, using remote RF switches and the Nodemcu controllers. The box was working fine when I removed it, and you can see a hacked RF doorbell which my Dad had wired in for the "tradesmen" entrance (aka the back door).

 

I'm just starting to design a solution so would be interested to hear how you got on with it.  There seem to be a plethora of RF devices available but not a lot of information to confirm which ones will play nicely together. I will take an iterative approach to building it up, starting with just one bell push and just one bell, but eventually I'll get them all working, and add a couple of remote bells or a buzzer that I can put in my pocket if I'm gardening.

 

 

 

 

[Nick Mace]

I’d say the answer is “sort of”.

 

I have absolutely no technical advice which I can give you I’m afraid because I’m way out of my depth with things like this!

 

I ended up using a Sonoff WiFi switch to operate 4 of the bells from a phone app. That just switched the power from a battery to ring a bell and move the indicator. I’m struggling to upload a photo at the moment. I’ll try again later.

Unfortunately I didn’t get as far as using remote switches which would be really useful. It was just a bit of fun to make it slightly more than an ornament. 

 

Funnily enough, I’ve been prompted to rethink mine a bit because we’re renovating our kitchen and have had to take it apart. Hi need to come up with a neater solution and would ideally like to be able to use all of the indicators and also get some of the wall switches working too.

 

If you come up with any bright ideas I’m keen to hear them. I’ve asked my 15 year old son to get his thinking cap on as well. I’ve told him that (with reason) he has a blank slate and can come up with any solution he wants!
 

I hope you can get it working well. They’re a fun thing to have in the house. 

[Hemsley]

I’ll let you know how I get on. I hope to progress the design over the next couple of weeks and try a prototype build over Christmas.

[Nick Mace]

I eventually got round to sorting this out.  Here's what I did:

 

I made a wooden box to house the electronics behind the bellboard (I've been getting into woodworking over the last 18 months so it was good to use some of the skills I've learned including hand cut dovetails no less!):

 

 

 

I then made a flat board to fit to the wall and which would also have room for a bell.  The box was fitted to that with hinges:

 

 

 

I routed channels in the back for some wiring:

 

 

My son really came up with most of the ideas for the electronics.  The basic idea was a wifi enabled arduino which would trigger relays to operate the magnets on the bellboard.  It would all be powered with 12v.  This is what we ended up with:

 

 

 

 

The final set up looks like this.

 

 

When you fire it up, the arduino connects to the wifi.  You find its IP address and put that into any web browser connected to the same network and you get this:

 

 

Press a button and, hey presto, the corresponding flag moves on the bellboard and the bell rings!  The buttons reset after a second or so.  We found the code for this on the web, but my son modified the html part of it to add the labels etc.  All of the bellboard flags work (with the exception of the front door, which we want to operate with a remote switch).

 

We’ve got a couple of other things we’d like to do with it.  One is to get the front doorbell to work on it which will require some kind of remote switch.  The other is that there are still some wall buttons in a couple of rooms and I’d really like to get those working with a remote switch.

 

[Ian Kinder (Bagpuss) - Joint Peak District AO]

Great mix of old and new, well done! Thanks for writing it up so well!

[Doug Dastardly]

We're just in the process of doing up an old house and are going to re-install ours and hope it still works. If it doesn't I might have to learn all of the gobbledegook above! 😆

 

Interesting fact.......I believe it's called an annunciator.

[Hemsley]

Nice work, I too like the way you’ve brought a modern interface to this. I’ve not made much progress with mine, too many other projects on the go!