[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] elfchick:
I have a somewhat complex question, and I am hoping that someone knows a good approach or apps that I can use.

I have Android devices in multiple rooms around my house, primarily set up as clocks, all on the home wi-fi network, of course. I have a primary phone, a couple of retired phones with wi-fi only, a couple of tablets with wi-fi only. (My eventual goal is to have them all connected together for several purposes, including an intercom system; this current project is a stepping stone.)

I have reminder alarms that go off all day long. Due to physical problems, the ability to control an alarm remotely is very handy.

I used to have the reminder alarms on my chumby, and I could ssh into that and control the alarm. I could change the alarm time, snooze, turn alarms on or off, etc. I used to just ssh into the chumby, then leave that konsole open on a virtual desktop on the linux machine, and switch to it when I needed to access the chumby. I also had an android remote control for it, very spiffy.

Sometimes, though, I was in another room and I didn't hear it. Problematic.

Yes, my obvious solution is to put all the alarms on my phone and carry it with me all the time. Except if I were the sort of person who has a mind like a steel trap, I wouldn't _need_ the reminder alarms in the first place :) It doesn't help much if the phone alarm is going off and it's three rooms away. Either I won't hear it, or I'll have to get up to shut it off, and I might not be able to.

So here's what I'd like to do:

* For each alarm, ALL the android devices sound off.

* Snoozing or dismissing the alarm from one device snoozes or dismisses the entire alarm (they all stop making noise, and they all start again when the snooze is up).

* Snooze or dismiss the alarms from my linux box with the same effects as from the android devices.

* Have some way to direct the alarms to just my phone until further notice--when I am going to be out of the house, I'll still need those reminder alarms, and the poor dogs don't need to deal with alarms sounding for hours until I get home.

1) It seems like the easiest way to manage this would be to set up something like a streaming media server on the linux box, and have it play on each of the android devices at times set up in a crontab. I *think* it was possible to stream media through multiple chumbies at the same time, so surely it's possible to do it through multiple android devices? Yes?

But I don't know how to use one to snooze a program set off by a crontab. I also don't know how to divert all the alarms to my phone [for use when leaving the house] if the alarms are primarily controlled by a linux server at home. I don't think my wi-fi reaches that far.

2) It seems like the next-most easy way to do this would be some kind of script that remotely controls the various android devices, but I have no idea where to start. I do know that you can access the terminal on an android phone, you can write shell scripts, and that you can ssh into phones if you have the right apps. What I don't know is how to control the android alarms from the command line or how to synchronize media on multiple devices.

Again, I'd want to snooze/dismiss alarms from any of the android devices on the wi-fi network, or from my linux computer.

I'd want to be able to turn off all alarms except the primary phone occasionally. It'd be awesome if the other devices could automatically detect if the phone were on the network, and only sound if it were present.

3) Other options? Are there apps or programs or scripts or methods that I don't know about, that would make this easy-peasy? Am I fretting when there is already a solution?

Thank you.