Is there an electronic gadget that will send an email when its contacts are connected together? Like, perhaps, to tell me my home alarm system has been activated? Is there a special name for such a thing?
My Insteon lighting control setup can do that. I can program it so any event, say turning on a light or pressing a button on a console keypad can send me an email or a text message. It’s not cheap though, the master controller is about $300 and individual modules are mostly $45-$100. There’s also a low voltage sensor so anything that can pass electricity can trigger a message.
You might look into Belkin products. They are moving into home automation, etc. To start your search look for Belkin WeMo.
Now if you are a do it yourselfer, you should look into Arduino notifications. I think to building this from scratch would cost you about $50 tops and the code to write it and assemble the pieces is easily googleable.
The company I work for (American Fibertek) makes devices that do exactly this, although they aren’t cheap.
Neither of these may help but…
I have this setup at home using X10 home automation. I got the module to detect circuit closure for $10 off ebay. It sends a signal to a $75 transceiver, but then you need a computer to send the email. I’m using a $50 Pogoplug that I installed Linux on instead of a full desktop computer.
A really roundabout way to cobble it together cheaply would be to use the X10 module (I’ll check it’s name later) to detect contact closure and send an off signal to a $10 X10 lamp module. Plugged into the lamp module is an old android phone running an app like Tasker that can email you when power is lost.
Sounds like a job for Raspberry Pi
The cheap-and-dirty UPS trigger alert I saw about 15 years ago was simple. The connection was hooked to a serial port. the program regularly sent out a signal - 1 byte I think. When the connection was closed, connecting wires on pins 2 and 3, it created a loop-back; the computer received the byte it sent. When it detected an incoming byte, the program performed the necessarya ctions - email an alert, begin system shutdown, etc.
There are plenty of miniature single-board PC’s around, I’m sure some even have a serial port. It depends how fancy you want to get and what your electronics and programming skills are.
If you wanted to DIY it, one option would be a Rabbit Semiconductor RCM6700 or similar module. These have a built-in Ethernet port and all the hardware and software needed to send email messages, and I/O pins that you can connect to your external inputs. You will need to build (or buy) a carrier board and write the software to do the job, but that’s fairly easy to do.