I live in the back bedroom of my apt, and I’m sick and tired of missing the buzzer. I either have to A. hover around the hallway, or B. tip toe around in my room like a church mouse so I can hear the buzz. This normally wouldn’t be too bad, except my friends take up to an hour or so to come over, or random people swing through when I’m not listening for anyone. What I’ve decided to do, is to connect one of those cop lights (you know the ones they take out of the glove compartment and stick on the roof.) to my buzzer. I talked to my super, and aside of him thinking I’m insane, he wasn’t much help, so I’m going to depend on my beloved Dopers to help me out here. To start off, me buzzer has 3 buttons, talk, listen, and buzz the door open. I don’t think there is much current going through the wires, so first my cop light will need to be plugged into something. Now when someone hits my buzzer, I assume when they are pushing the button, they are completing some type of circuit, and voila! BBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZ I obviously need to connect a device to the circuit, but I’ll be damned if I know what. The device will have to perform the following functions….’sees’ someone completing the circuit, be able to feed power, or allow power to be fed for a short amount of time to the cop light, and then cut the juice. One last concern I have is frying the building’s intercom system, or having a wire short in my house, thus burning it to a crisp. I’m sure there are systems for hearing impaired people, but what I’m looking for is an inexpensive RadioShack solution. A nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated.
BTW everytime the light goes off, I’ll say “Damn its about time the 10 millionth customer got here”
