TV TELILE is a unique community television station in Nova Scotia that needed an emergency alerting system. They are found on Channel 10 using an antenna, Channel 4 on the EastLink cable system in western Richmond County, and on Channel 5 on the Seaside cable system. As required by CRTC, Telile must carry the national emergency alert feed from Pelmorex and raised funds to purchase a solution. There are many expensive proprietary systems on the market that were out of reach, instead they investigated the cost saving benefits of using an open source approach.
We supplied an off the shelf alerting box, running our production open source CAP alerting software v5.1.1 This install had assistance from a local technician Al McNeil who created a switching interface between our RS232 DTR triggering the Black Magic router GPIO. From what I can tell everything is configured and operating properly and receiving heartbeats from Pelmorex. We did a hard reset test (pulling power plug) and all services came up properly on restart. To ensure this piece of crucial equipment is operational at all times, we have included a new monitoring service that sends out automated emails if the alert player is accidentally put offline, missing Pelmorex heartbeats or if the actual CAP alert application isn’t responsive.
The setup is now running in production and is compliant with the CRTC emergency alerting regulations. The success of the implementation is due to a combination of open source software and the hard work of local technicians. Telile is now able to accept, parse and play out the CAP alert feed from Pelmorex, which is critical for emergency broadcasting.
With this project we added the following features:
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Nagios remote monitoring into our entire product line and source code
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Added a custom background graphic to display with CAP overlay scroll, in case alert did not have a graphic image attachment
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Ability to customize parameters and polarity of DTR in dashboard
We published this open source code into the public GIT repository for other stations to utilize.
Alert Player with RS232 DTR to GPIO
Nagios remote monitoring telemetry report