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Home Automation Tips and Tricks Archive
June 1997

We live in the "boonies" in northern Ontario and, consequently, have frequent wildlife marauders wandering around the place at night (racoons, foxes, black bears, etc..)

We wondered just how we could get some pictures of these fellows without having to get up in the middle of the night on sentry duty.

Sooo, I took extended the base (using a commercially available adapter) of one of the sensor floodlights on our deck and plugged our video camera's AC adapter into it.

Located the camera inside the house to have a clear view of the deck. Now, whenever the sensor turns on the lights, it also turns on the videocamera which captures the activities of our visitors.

We got pictures of some red foxes, one _very_ large black bear beating the bejabbers out of our garbage can and one racoon climbing the edge of the garage door to gain access to our bird suet feeders which are hung from the garage soffits.

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Control of the 24Vac electrical water valves is by X-10. Since this communication system is not 100% reliable, I was leary at first of this approach, but it has proven to be trouble free. There is also a safety feature built into the control system. If any of the water valves turns on for whatever reason, an X-10 command is sent. The central controller sees this command and checks if the turnon was due to a previously sent command. If it is not, all water valves are shut down.

The circuit to control the water valves is shown below, if there is any current flow, there will be a voltage drop across the diodes, and the X-10 module will be triggered to send a command.

Schematic of irrigation control circuit

The circuit works as follows. When the UM506 closes its contacts, there will be current flow thru the diodes, and a voltage of two diode drops will be developed, causing the PF284 to send out an X-10 command. The central computer sees this X-10 command and verifies that there was a valid command previously sent to turn on a zone. I have a counter implemented in software that keeps track of how many false triggers there have been. Before I added my Whole House X-10 Blocker, I used to have one or two a month. After that, I have not had any false triggers. The initial false triggers were the reason I added the protection circuit. It seems that they are just an unnecessary precaution now.

Four zones of irrigation are so controlled, they are turned on automatically once or twice a week in the very early hours of the morning. My plans are to add a fifth zone to slow drip irrigate all the beds in the back of my house someday.

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Security systems will take care of letting one know if his/her doors are closed. An armed system will sound the alarm if the door is opened. The problem is safety. A client of mine wanted to know when the doors were locked so that she knew that her child could not go to the backyard pool. No problem.

I installed plunger contacts into the deadbolt receiving hole and ran the wire to a wireless transmitter. Using the Omni from HAI makes this a great solution, because it has AUXILIARY zones, which do not effect the operation of the alarm. They only report status.

So, using this status, when the homeowner tries to arm the system, a light flashes letting them know that a door remains unlocked. She can also check the status of those consecutive zones to see if any are left unlocked.

This solution was a big relief to my clients.

Components:
Ademco Plunger Contacts PRO55T-WH $2.40ea
Optional: Linear Wireless Receiver LN-SXR64 $99.95
Optional: Linear Wireless Transmitter LN-DXT31 $27.95ea

The same thing could be done with the JDS Timecommander using the digital inputs.

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What you do is Get a closing contact Inerface Module and a timer controller that is programed to send a command to the door inferface module at a specific time. You set it to close at like 9 O'Clock. But you throw in a N/O Sensor in the switch wiring so that when it sends the signal and the door is allready closed it won't accidentilly open it back up. Then you set the timer to send another signal 5 min later in case something happened the first time. You wire the Inferface module to the contact with one wire the from the contact to the opener and conect it like the push butten switch. Bring the second wire from the inerface module to the opener and connect it like the other butten wire,

Materials
- X10 Powerhouse Universal Module that dry contacts momentarly N/O magnetic contacts wire

Cost
- about $25-$30

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I have the X10 ActiveHome kit and an X10 wireless PIR (DM10A) that works with the RF module in the ActiveHome kit. When someone approaches the house, the PIR sends out an X10 code (for example A1). With the Activehome software, I wrote a simple macro that turns on a small table lamp (set to A5) when it sees this X10 code. There is no macro to turn off the lamp. When we come home, if we see that the lamp is on, we know someone has been to our door and do a quick check outside the front door. Then we reset the lamp using the keychain remote, which is set to the same code as the lamp module. You can have the macro turn on other things besides a lamp. I'm thinking of replacing the lamp with a simple LED circuit hooked up to an appliance module. Cost of all components is about $130 (Activehome is about $100 and the PIR is about $30), but it also gets you a powerfull home automation tool.

We've found it useful because our mail carrier will sometimes leave small packages (but too big to fit in the mailbox) by our front door if no one is home. Unfortunately, we usually enter and exit our home through the garage out back and may not look out the front door for days at a time. We've had a couple of incidents where packages were sitting outside our door for who knows how long. Now, with this detector, we know when someone's been to the door.

Component List: X10 ActiveHome kit X10 Wireless PIR (DM10A)

Total Cost: $130 US

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