Arduino in the workplace

Motorola Advisor II connected to an Adafruit protoboard shield on an Arduino.

Recently I was faced with an interesting challenge at work. How could I monitor our paging infrastructure (pagers, yes pagers, I work in healthcare) to ensure it was up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? I had the ability to monitor certain portions of the system but no way to automate the monitoring of the end-to-end system, all the way out to the pager, keep in mind this technology is a one-way technology. My experience in the electronics hobby and having a developer background gave me an idea, I could attach the pager to an Arduino and write a Microsoft Windows service that would receive heartbeats and page received alerts via serial over USB and log those to a file that our enterprise monitoring system could watch. In fact, our enterprise monitoring system could send an email which gets converted to TAP via some SMTP-to-TAP software we have in use already.

So, the enterprise monitoring tool will send a page to our test pager, once the pager receives the page it’ll notify the windows service using serial communications, which will in turn write the event to a log file (I could have used the event log). The Arduino will also send a heartbeat message every minute which also gets written to the log file. This will allow our monitoring tool to raise an event if the Arduino goes offline. We’ll add some additional business logic in the monitoring software to page several times before opening up an incident but yes, I think this will indeed work and work quite well. How else is a company that is dependent on 1970 open-loop technology monitor it without something like this? I’m curious if others have solved a problem like this and how?

It didn’t take me long to get a simple windows service built that listens on the specified COM port for serial messages from the Arduino. There are lots of examples of this being done, just google it. Hooking the pager up to the Arduino was also super simple, I just used the existing connection to the vibration motor on the pager and tied that to an analog pin on the Arduino. I also didn’t want to have to bother with batteries for the pager so I hooked up a LM317 adjustable voltage regulator to supply the 1.5V the pager was expecting from the 5V on the USB line. After hooking everything up, I must say the system works quite nicely, we’ll see how well it behaves long term but this project proves how useful a simple Arduino can be in the workplace. As always all the project files are attached to this post for everyone.

Till next time…