General Purpose Alarm Device v2.0.1

The General Purpose Alarm Device (GPAD) shines lights and makes loud noises to draw the attention of a human being to a problem. It has a programmable 80 character display to provide textual information. A mute button toggles the sound on and off. Fundamentally it is designed to act as a peripheral to a controlling computer or microcontroller. The controller may communicate over a USB (COM) connection or through a 5V SPI connection via an RJ12 cable. The GPAD is intended to be as general purpose as possible, so that it can be used to provide alarm functionality for many engineering, scientific, hobby machines, instruments, and situations. The original driving use case is to provide medical alarm capability to the PolyVent [5] open-source mechanical medical ventilator. The GPAD supports 5 alarm levels above "silent" of increasing urgency in terms of light, rhythm, and frequency. It is based on the Arduino Uno Atmega328 design and potentially extensible the same way an Uno is, through headers and shields. It includes the printed wiring assembly, firmware for the GPAD peripheral, a simple documented API and a 3D printable enclosure. The repo includes instructions for using a second GPAD as a controller.