Alarm and Shutdown addon update to v1.2 beta

Don’t like to read? Here’s the video version of this article

Hello, folks!

While a couple of full-fledged tutorials are currently in making, let me have just a few minutes of you time to announce an update for my good’ol Alarm and Shutdown addon to version 1.2 Beta, which now allows you not only to play a sound alarm and put your computer to sleep or shut it down by timer, but now also to send an email notification on render completion event. And now it also supports Blender 2.8!
Now, if you never heard of the addon, you just install it as usual, go to User Preferences (or just Preferences for Blender 2.8) choose Render category there, enable the addon.

Blender 2.79
Blender 2.8 Beta

And now, here you have a brand new option to set up your custom sound file for the alarm (don’t forget to uncheck “Relative path” when selecting a sound file!). And also a set of options to setup automatic e-mails when your render is complete. Be adviced that this feature is in beta state and with some email service providers it might not work. I’ve tested it on several services and it worked fine, except for Google mail, which just wont accept my user name and password for some reason. I’ve never figured out why yet. But there is plenty of free email service providers out there to choose from. In my case I use my Yandex mail.
The setup is really simple and you have to do it once. All the required data typically freely available for the users.

First you type in an address of so called SMTP server (or host), it’s for out-coming mail. In my case it’s smtp.yandex.ru. Some servers require an SSL connection and/or specific port, you can set it up here as an option. Then you enter your user name and password from you email account. And, finally, you have to set from whom you’re sending and to whom, respectively. And these two fields can be the same – nobody stops you from sending an email to yourself. Now, when everything is set don’t forget to hit the save settings button.

Fields marked with * are mandatory

Now go to Render tab in Properties region (for Blender 2.8 it’ll be Output tab), find Alarm and Shutdown panel here, enable it. And now you can set alarm sound type, its volume, check it out prior to render. Then you can set up shut-down type and timeout until it triggers, pretty straight forward. And, well, Send Email Notification check-box is pretty self explanatory.

Now, if you hit Render, when it’s complete, you will hear a sound alarm and if you’ve set shut-down timer to anything but zero, you’ll see big warning button, that let’s you abort shut-down timer, until it ran out.

Big abort button is big

In a few moments, depending on your mail service provider, you’ll get an automatic message with a scene name, file name and a timestamp. This feature might be useful when you’re away from your computer, but you need to know when a rendering is finished, or notify your colleagues for example, so they can grab the files and use it further down the pipeline. If you haven’t got the message in a reasonable time, be sure to check your spam box – it might end up there. If it isn’t there, try to check blender console for possible errors. Don’t forget it’s still in beta 🙂
And that’s it for update 1.2 Beta. You can get it for free from Gumroad. Don’t forget to share your thoughts on how to improve it, and whether you find it useful at all. I hope you will, guys 🙂
Subscribe to my youtube channel to keep track of new interesting stuff. Also leave comments right here! 

Happy Blending!

7 comments to “Alarm and Shutdown addon update to v1.2 beta”

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  1. Chris - 30/09/2019 Reply

    couldn’t find the addon tab in output tab in Blender 2.80.75

    here’s the screenshots :
    https://i.ibb.co/D4FGmFr/image.png
    https://i.ibb.co/09mj20H/image.png

    • Sergey Metelskiy - 06/10/2019 Reply

      Hi, Chris! Sorry for long response. By the look of it, you’re using a wrong version of the addon (2.79 version), try installing specific version for 2.8x. It should work just fine in both official 2.80 and 2.81

  2. mm - 28/03/2019 Reply

    couldn’t install with gumroad fild and couldn’t find it in the addon tab.

    • Sergey Metelskiy - 28/03/2019 Reply

      Have you tried to install it by copying the contents of the archive in your addons folder?

    • AndrewPo - 01/09/2019 Reply

      Had the same problem. I extracted the content in the archive then I used 7zip to make another archive of type “.zip”. After that it appeared in the addon tab.

  3. Pavel - 04/02/2019 Reply

    Not working in 2.8

    • Sergey Metelskiy - 04/02/2019 Reply

      Could you please send me your blender console log right after launch (with the addon enabled)? Also, what version of Blender do you use (build)?

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