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[Music] good afternoon everybody we're gonna do alarm notification next with Greg Hicks out of our Bedford Nova Scotia Canada office and this should be an interesting subject so take it away Greg hi everybody everybody had fun last night yeah yeah I had fun too luckily Dan came and posted posted my bail so just kidding I didn't I didn't need to be bailed out so I'm a I'm a developer with with trihedral and I am responsible to a large degree for a lot of what happens in alarm notifications so if it's not working for you you know who to blame when I was when I was a kid my parents were medical missionaries in Central Africa and Burundi and about 1965 there was some trouble and the government in order to forestall communications they couldn't control came and took away our means of communicating with headquarters in the States and to do that they took away our short-wave receivers I don't know why they didn't take the transmitter but they came and they took away our receiver which was a big box amia luckily my dad had had the foresight to bring a little transistor radio that could receive shortwave with them and the moral of that story is that it's always good to have a backup or an alternate way of doing things so the first part of the presentation is going to be a discussion of some of the alternative some of the options that we have for you for doing alarm notification as in voice communication or paging or tour or text messaging we still have we still have customers out there who are using pagers it's it it seems a little antiquated but sometimes in a factory or shopfloor environment it's the best way to communicate anymore it it's hard at least in our neck of the woods to find a service provider who will do it but they're they're doing it using their own drone transponders and so that's still gets harder and harder even to test it but it's still a viable alternative this parts gonna go pretty quick so if you want to send text message messages and text messages are one of my favorite means for alarm notification there's three alternatives really you can either get a cell modem like the one in the picture you need to get a data plan and a SIM card for it you can use Twilio Julio has a facility for sending text messages or you can use compact email most cell service providers have an email gateway so you do something like prepend your your number to the to the gateway so be like 902 seven one nine one four one two and VM CA or something like that interactive voice also two alternatives there's using a voice modem and are using Twilio now voice modems are kind of an aging technology and I think as Barry pointed out in in the in the in the openings know I was in the in the why we do what we do session said that Microsoft doesn't really support voice modems very well anymore they just don't work on the other hand you know we've been refining our PSP our voice mode of interface originally based on the on the Microsoft api's and interfaces but as I said refining it over the years to the point where it's pretty solid and robust as long as you can struggle through the Microsoft regime of installing drivers and and windows updates that over right through registry and things like that there's there's some configuration headaches that come from the fact that you're using a modem but it's a pretty solid robust way of doing voice communications Tullio is something that we started doing because we needed a a hardware less way of doing voice alarm notification so if you're running an AWS or a VM of some virtual machine of some kind you need well you you it's good to have something that doesn't require that you plug a hardware device into it now there are some alternatives to physically plugging a modem in if you will really really want to use a voice modem you can use it a dingy box which has rs-232 connectors on it and you connect to a via the network so you can use virtual machines connect physical modems that way but you still need hardware to make that work Twilio is a company used by well big companies all over the world over for example it uses Twilio for a lot of their a lot of their stuff and if you're if you're looking in the platform-as-a-service world for telecommunications and voice communications Twilio is essentially the big dog it also has the advantage for us in a in a Windows environment if you want to run VT SCADA as a service sappy which is the Microsoft text-to-speech API is not available in in the service space it's only available in user space so if you want to do text-to-speech on your machine it's got to be with the logged in user with Twilio we don't have to worry about that because the text-to-speech is being done by the Twilio service as opposed to locally on the machine so it allows you to do voice based alarm notification and still have VP Skater running as a service I have I have mixed feelings about modems and the use of modems in general because like I said I think what we've got now is pretty solid I'm pretty proud of how well it works given the environment it's got to work in but modems and even landlines in general are kind of a dying technology this is from the multi tech website multitec I don't like to recommend modems but multi tech makes the products that I generally use myself for testing and they're pretty reliable but you can see they're saying data line costs are going to double over the next 12 months service is getting worse just to drive the point home a little bit this is broadband versus dial-up blue line at the bottom is is is dial-up this this graph is five years old I wasn't able to find something more recent there's still a few people out there using dial-up modems but it's tailing away and again landline phones I don't know if they're gonna die in five years 10 years or 20 years but they're definitely on a glide path so it's it's worth thinking about alternatives so I've already spoken to most of this but it's it's Twilio is not very expensive as a solution it's a lot cheaper than a landline is it said it's $1 a month for a phone number and then penny a minute for voice penny a text pretty inexpensive it pretty inexpensive solution okay this is the exciting part I'm not going to spend time showing you a voice modem or probably we're probably not going to have time to get to email I'm sure most of you know how that works anyways so I'm going to take the time to fire up an app test application and we're going to configure Twilio on it and make a call to a volunteer in the audience so if I can reach my most kind of stuck down in there okay I'm gonna start here I'm gonna add a realm I'm gonna call the realm Twilio I hope that's not too confusing we couldn't call it Bob if we wanted to but okay I'll have to come back to this let's make a new application start it up secure the application very secure password is a username is a now I'm gonna add another account and just to avoid confusion will call it Twilio again actually I'm gonna call it Twilio user password is aardvark and I'm only adding one privilege here Internet client access that's all we need everything else should be unselected because that's all we need for this this is this is so that we can have have some credentials that we give give to Twilio when we configure it when we get a volunteer will add the volunteer to a roster but for the time being we're not gonna do that now because we're doing a live demo and I don't have a I don't have a domain name configured and that's something that we need I use a tool called end rock and what it does is it it's an HTTP tunneling utility helper or something like that recommend that you not use this without talking to your IT people because they may not appreciate having a hole right through all their firewalls but in an applic and an application like this it's it's pretty safe so I'm just gonna set up port forwarding here so it's okay there we go so we'll be able to use that as our domain name 0 2 3 4 ECC and Rio when we when we get to that stage of the configuration so let's go into edit properties here we'll go to the alarms I don't want to have to wait five minutes in the demo so we're going to change that to 5 seconds and then we'll go down and enable Twilio and I have my Twilio account open here there if you if you go and create your own Twilio account you can create an account for free but when you make calls it'll have an annoying this is a trial account being spoken at the beginning of every voice huh pterence and it's pretty cheap to just put 10 bucks or so on on the account just for making calls with all so you'll need to configure a phone number which is a dollar a month expense they give you a phone number to use for test purposes but you you may want your own phone number for for playing around with so I'm gonna copy the SID I'm gonna copy the auth here these are these are credentials from your Twilio account now I'm going to go to end rock and there we go so I'm just gonna copy that domain that that they gave me they're fairly useful and if you if you do want to use them they you can pay them to host your domain name and do your own tunneling if that's something you want to do but normally you would sort out a fixed IP with with the domain with your IT people I'm just again I'm just using end rock because it's convenient in this sort of ok and see you did I entered a realm I have a realm called Twilio I need to add my application here so I've got a realm set up in the internet client-server set up so the same kind of access you'd use for configuring me at the Vic or the anywhere client so this becomes Twilio RVT SCADA username was 1200 user my password was hard Burke and that should be all the configuration we need now bring up the idea studio I'm going to add a roster tag and I need a volunteer from the middle of the room anybody I'm gonna pick you yes yeah what's your name John I'm gonna start with what are you in here I'm gonna add you as a user I'm gonna just save this add you as a user to the app and come back to this so I'm giving you one two three as a password here and alternate identify identification defaults to four characters so we're gonna make that one two three four okay and we're gonna make John a super user not necessary in this case but that's that's how we're gonna set up so let's go back find your roster we're gonna add John and put them in to the security field here and what's your phone number all right okay so let's let's draw this Gamla stall ready defaults to the history list which is what we want so we'll select our roster and let's hope this works if you can put it on speaker that'd be great so one two three four followed by the number key let's press one and asterisks just press the asterisk key the star key so you can see we've we've acknowledged our alarm and that's really all there is to it okay and rock is a pretty useful tool I'm gonna change the roster a little bit here I'm going to change John so that he's getting an SMS text instead of a voice call so I just sent John I just raised an alarm and John should have gotten an SMS with the alarm there it is okay if you can just copy that text you received and and reply to it with the copied text and we should get our alarm code back I usually just when a text comes in I just hold my thumb down on it and the menu come up and say copy text and then I just paste it in and send it it does have to be those six digits included in the body of the text sorry the question was can you just copy the text and and paste it into the reply and the answer is yes you don't have to just have only the six the six digits but you can there we go there's our acknowledge yeah if you look if you look at how we configured that contact we put the contact username in here if you don't fill in the username then they then they'll get the notification but they won't get an act acknowledge code and they won't be able to acknowledge the alarm so we spend most of our time talking about Leo's stuff as I said we actually have three different ways of sending text messages and two different ways of sending voice and and I also do a lot of notification by email as well so I don't know if anybody has any questions but I think we're almost at a time I think we're almost out of time but I'm around I'll be in the developers den and happy to field any any questions there as well thanks a lot guys [Applause]