So, the slightly pricey driveway alert product we'd had since 2019 has gotten flakey; apparently the sensors have a limited service life outdoors.
I may have mentioned before that its utility is limited by the fact that someone else within radio range of here (nominally ½ mile) has the same product, so we were getting an alert any time someone walked in front of their sensor. There are four channels, but the receiver listens to all four of them, and there's no way to ignore the one the neighbor is using.
Rather than trying to find a sensor that's still in full working order - for some reason, at least two of them now work only at close range, and fail to send a signal all the way up to the house when placed halfway down the driveway - I ordered a cheap 4-sensor system from Amazon. Q&A indicates that the sensors are somehow paired with the receiver: good. It has a bunch of alert tones to choose from.
Turns out the instruction sheet is seriously lacking - as in, doesn't even show how to find the battery compartment. Have to revisit the Amazon product page for that.
There's nothing about how to assign a different tone for each sensor; reviews suggest it may not be possible.
And: regardless of the tone selected, a brief power outage causes the receiver to reset to Doorbell. Great: we already have two things that sound like doorbells here.
Grrrrr.
What would a good system look like?
For starters, there would be a process for pairing sensors and receivers. Ideally, this would allow having multiple sensors all sending to multiple receivers, so you could get all the alerts whether you were in the house, the garage, or the barn.
The pairing process would include assigning, on the receiver, the alert tone for the sensor being paired.
And the pairing data, and the tone assignments, would bloody well be stored in nonvolatile memory!
There's no need for a vast selection of cheerful little tunes. A modest number of distinctive, and brief, sounds would suffice. A deluxe model might allow user-supplied sounds.
Oh, well. Guess I'll try to find a working sensor for the old system. The new one, well, maybe I'll find some use for it. Long term, I need to deploy a bunch of solar-powered sensors reporting to a hub, with the hub connected to the house network, and maybe I can use UDP broadcast messages or something when there's an event and have client devices worry about playing sounds or whatever.
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