A teacher replaces the school siren with a musical bell managed from a spreadsheet
David Cordones says that, with the help of generative AI, he built a school bell on a Raspberry Pi that staff change from Google Sheets.
The school musical bell, created by David Cordones, replaces the siren with melodies chosen by the teachers themselves. According to its author, it already runs daily at his school after a trial period.
The setup is modest: a Raspberry Pi connected by cable to the network and to the school’s public address system. A Google Sheets spreadsheet with drop-down menus lets those in charge choose which song plays at each period or break. The songs are MP3 files that are dragged into a shared folder on the local network.
The logic is handled by a Python script, which checks the calendar every minute and uses a local copy if the internet goes down, and a Google Apps Script bridge that updates the drop-down menus when a new MP3 appears. According to its author, AI helped to design the script and the background services, to write the bridge and to solve problems with permissions, audio and the network.
The author offers to share diagrams, code and a technical guide with anyone who wants to replicate it. For now the description comes from his message: there is no public project page and it has not been possible to check that it works.
A teacher replaces the school siren with a musical bell managed from a spreadsheet
David Cordones says that, with the help of generative AI, he built a school bell on a Raspberry Pi that staff change from Google Sheets.
The school musical bell, created by David Cordones, replaces the siren with melodies chosen by the teachers themselves. According to its author, it already runs daily at his school after a trial period.
The setup is modest: a Raspberry Pi connected by cable to the network and to the school’s public address system. A Google Sheets spreadsheet with drop-down menus lets those in charge choose which song plays at each period or break. The songs are MP3 files that are dragged into a shared folder on the local network.
The logic is handled by a Python script, which checks the calendar every minute and uses a local copy if the internet goes down, and a Google Apps Script bridge that updates the drop-down menus when a new MP3 appears. According to its author, AI helped to design the script and the background services, to write the bridge and to solve problems with permissions, audio and the network.
The author offers to share diagrams, code and a technical guide with anyone who wants to replicate it. For now the description comes from his message: there is no public project page and it has not been possible to check that it works.
