CORVALLIS, Ore. — MagicBox Inc. and CentrAlert, a privately held emergency communications company of Issaquah Washington, today announced a new device module for the CentrAlert EOS public alert and notification system. This new module provides for video alert messaging via cut-in to a MagicBox Digital Signage System.
MagicBox, Inc. provides the core alert hardware device through the Aavelin system — a rack-mounted, turnkey, digital signage and video messaging system. The Aavelin hardware systems can accept digital control command signals from the CentrAlert EOS through serial port and/or Ethernet communications. These EOS commands, when decoded, instruct the Aavelin unit to display EOS horizontal alert and notification messages, as crawl and static content, at the top or bottom of the TV or monitor screen. The CentrAlert EOS communications interface to the Aavelin system(s) is provided via a special Aavelin firmware EOS protocol interface.
For example, an alert message could be sent via a cable TV broadcast at a large university and a local area television broadcast for a tornado alert (or terrorist event, or many other emergency scenarios, as required). This alert type takes place in parallel and simultaneous with many other types of EOS alerts including (but not limited to) sirens, text messaging, telephone calls, radio broadcasts, tone alert radios, etc. This benefits the emergency dispatch user, as it reduces a complex situation into a single integrated EOS graphical and map-based interface. What used to take several individual, non-integrated device interfaces, dispatchers and a much larger knowledge set is now a much more manageable and effective system solution. This also results in simpler training and on-going maintenance, as well.
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