In that half-second, the routing engine reads the signal, identifies the building, identifies the device, classifies the event, and decides which channels to fire. The phone routes to the front office. The PA begins the lockdown announcement. The signs in the lobby change to shelter-in-place. The local 911 PSAP is dialed. The superintendent’s cell rings.
Half a second isn’t long. It’s long enough for a routing decision to fan out across every channel a school has.
The first time you see it happen in a drill, it doesn’t feel fast. It feels almost casual. Like the building shifted weight.
That is what designing for emergencies looks like when it’s working. Calm. Coordinated. Almost casual. The opposite is what most emergency systems feel like: loud, disorienting, alarming in ways that produce panic rather than action. The fire alarm at the school you went to. The earthquake drill that scared more children than it taught. The lockdown announcement that made the kindergarteners cry.
We have spent the last four years trying to build the calm version.
The cascade
What happens in the half-second after.
+0 ms
The button is pressed.
A pendant on a lanyard, a wall-mounted station, or a desk button. The signal leaves at 900 MHz toward the in-building receiver.
+12 ms
The receiver hands it to the routing engine.
Identified by device serial, location tag, and event type. No human intermediary. No queue.
+44 ms
The routing graph fans out.
Same engine that handles a normal call. Different paths fire because the event class is different.
+120 ms
The PA system begins the announcement.
Pre-recorded by the principal, in the principal’s voice. Loud enough to be heard in the gym, soft enough not to terrify a kindergartener.
+180 ms
The 911 PSAP is dialed.
With the exact room. The silent, direct alert Alyssa’s Law calls for is what this architecture was designed around.
+220 ms
The phones in the front office light up.
Specific phones. Not all the phones. The ones that should know.
+340 ms
The signs in the entryway change.
From the daily schedule to a shelter-in-place pictogram. Visible from the parking lot, from the bus loop, from the cafeteria pass-through.
+480 ms
The superintendent’s phone rings.
And the SRO. And the maintenance lead with the master key. The list is configurable. It is also short on purpose.
+0.5 s
The half-second is up.
By now the building has already shifted. The teacher who pressed the button is still holding their hand against the wall, looking at it.
The discipline.
Designing for emergencies is not the same as designing for normal operation with a “panic mode.” It is a different discipline with different rules. The system is going to be used by someone who is frightened, possibly injured, possibly hiding, possibly in a hallway full of children who are also frightened. The interface for that person has to be: one button. Press it. The system does everything else.
There is no menu. There is no choice. There is no decision the user has to make in the worst moment of their professional life. The decision was made when the system was configured, by people in a room, with coffee, on a Tuesday in August. Those people are the principal, the IT lead, the SRO, the superintendent’s office. They sat down once and decided what should happen. The teacher in the worst moment of their career inherits the calm of that Tuesday.
The teacher in the worst moment of their career inherits the calm of that Tuesday.
This is the entire posture. The system absorbs the cognitive load that the person at the button cannot afford to carry. Everything difficult (the routing logic, the conditional fan-out, the integration with the PA and the signage and the 911 PSAP, the coordination across radio frequencies) happens on the inside of the system. The outside is a button.
The devices
Three physical objects.
Each designed to be findable in the dark, pressable through fabric, and survivable. None of them have screens. None of them require a login. They are objects, not interfaces.
B1
Pendant
For the person who walks the building.
Hangs on a lanyard around the neck. Pressed through a sweater, through a sleeve, through whatever you happen to be wearing. The button is recessed enough to not press itself. Recessed less than you’d think.
Weight34 g
Range to receiver900 ft in-building
Battery2 yr, swap
SealingIP67
B4
Wall station
For the room with the most foot traffic.
Mounted at child-shoulder height on purpose. Findable in a crowd, findable in the dark. The dome is glass so that pressing it is decisive. The act of breaking the seal is the act of activating.
MountSurface or recessed
PowerPoE + battery backup
Audible feedbackNone
TamperReports back
B6
Desk button
For the front office.
Sits on the receptionist’s desk between the stapler and the visitor log. The kind of object you almost forget is there, until the moment it’s the only object that matters. Wired, not wireless. The receptionist doesn’t get a low-battery alert during a bad week.
ConnectionDirect to receiver
Travel4 mm, firm
Latency to engine~8 ms
ColorThat red
A note on radio
Why we chose 900 MHz.
The phones in the office run on Wi-Fi. The signage runs on the wired network. The 911 dialing runs on the SIP trunks. The buttons do not.
They run on a 900 MHz radio link to a receiver inside the building, and the reason is uncomfortably simple: in an emergency, the Wi-Fi network is often the first thing that fails. Either because it’s saturated (every parent in the parking lot suddenly opens Facebook), or because the IT closet is part of the incident, or because power went out and the access points are dark. The link between the button and the routing engine cannot depend on any of these.
900 MHz is a long-wavelength, license-free band. The waves go through drywall, through brick, through the cinder-block stairwell that Wi-Fi can’t reach. The bandwidth is tiny. A button press is one bit. We do not need bandwidth. We need reach and independence from the network you are trying to save.
2.4 GHz
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Short wavelength. Blocked by walls. Saturated in a crowd. Not what we used.
900 MHz
Industrial telemetry, the buttons
Long wavelength. Passes through structure. Independent of any other network. What we used.
An honest moment
What we hope.
We hope you never use it.
We have built and shipped this capability with the kind of care you bring to something that has to work the first time, every time, under conditions no one wants to imagine. We have also built it hoping that the only time it is ever pressed is during a drill, by a fifth-grader who was given the honor of leading the lockdown practice.
If a button is ever pressed in earnest, we will know. The system will tell us. We will sit at our desks in Washougal and read the timestamps and we will hope, very quietly, that the half-second of cascade was enough.
The other 99.9% of the time
What this is the rest of the year.
Most of Now’s life is uneventful. The buttons sit on lanyards and on walls and on the receptionist’s desk and they do not get pressed. This is good. The system is doing exactly what it should do, which is mostly nothing.
Once a quarter, the principal runs a drill. The state of Washington requires this. The drill activates the cascade with a flag that marks it as a drill: the PA announcement is the drill version, the 911 PSAP is not dialed, the superintendent gets a notification not a call. Everything else fires. The signs change. The phones light up. The teachers practice walking children to the corners of their rooms.
Afterwards, the system writes a report. Which buttons were pressed. Which rooms responded. Which doors were locked within 60 seconds and which weren’t. The principal walks through the report on Monday morning. The maintenance lead schedules the doors that didn’t lock. This is the part of the job that’s most of the job.
Designing for the worst day is most of the work. Designing for the drill is most of the use.
For the record
What’s in the box.
✓Designed for Alyssa’s Law. Direct 911 dial with location, no human intermediary.
✓900 MHz in-building radio. Independent of Wi-Fi. Independent of power, with battery backup.
✓Configurable cascade. You decide what fires. We make sure it fires fast.
✓Drill mode. Practice without calling 911. Get a report. Schedule the fixes.
✓E911 notification routing. The right people get called in the right order.
✓Signage integration. If you have Screens, the signs change too.
✓PA integration. Pre-recorded announcements in the principal’s voice.
✓OETC contract pricing. Available to Oregon districts through the cooperative.
✓On-prem receiver. Lives in the building. Does not depend on the cloud to do its job.
✓Quarterly health check. We test the cascade on your behalf. You get the report.
If you’d like to talk about putting this in your school, we would like to talk to you. If we never end up shipping this to you because you decide it’s not the right fit, that is also OK. We would rather have an honest conversation than a sale.