While Australia has remained relatively free from incidents like the Columbine or Sandy Hook school shootings, recently there has been increased interest in the education community around automated lockdown and alert systems.

Now WA-based Altronic Distributors, through its well-known Redback brand, has entered the fray with a lockdown controller that is compatible with its A 4575A alert/evac controller and A 4596 paging console.

The controller has provision for a period bell plus a ‘standby’, ‘lockdown’ and ‘all clear’ tones. These can be activated by the switches on the front of the controller, by the remote closing contact triggers on the rear of the unit or by the optional wall plate.

It is powered by a 24V DC source and separate 24V DC switched outputs are supplied for remote triggering of all tone conditions (pre-bell, period bell, standby, lockdown and all clear). Connections to paging consoles and wall plates are made with Cat 5e cabling, and up to eight paging consoles or wall plates can be connected at one time.

The audio output is 1V rms line level and is adjustable via a trimpot adjustment on the rear of the unit. A pre-bell/chime/tone is included and can only be triggered by the closing the contact on the rear of the unit. All of these tones are stored on an SD card in MP3 format, which is accessed at the rear of the unit. Using MP3 files gives the user complete control over the sounds played for each tone. This could be music, a pre-recorded tone or speech, etc.

The standby and lockdown tones can also be set to loop/repeat via external DIP switches.

If the standby or lockdown tone is activated, the corresponding switch on the front of the unit will stay illuminated until the tone has finished playing. After this, the switch will continue to illuminate until the lockdown overrides the standby condition or the all clear condition is activated. If the all clear tone is activated the all clear switch will stay illuminated until the tone finishes.

For more information, be sure to check out www.altronics.com.au or the 27th annual Build It Yourself catalogue, which has just been released.