Re: Comfort an Homevision inputs

[Kevin Hawkins <tivo@xxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [ukha_d] Comfort an Homevision inputs

Hi Eamon,

   I use Comfort and Homevision ( & ACE ) and a couple
of others (Homeseer / ECS) in this scenario. In fact I also have another
separate 'professionally maintained' Alarm system as well. Because of that
I have had to explore all the things you are asking here. I won't duplicate
all the other detail provided except to say the following:

   I encourage you to use a UCM with Comfort. You might find
that you can't do everything you want here as the UCM is still evolving but
it provides for the majority of functions. If you have a spare PC or space
on an existing one then I would recommend adding ACE (or CWI) to provide a
workhorse behind it all. Ace integrates really well with HomeVision.

   As Andrew said it is simply an issue of current drawn as
to whether you can run all these sensors off Comforts inbuilt psu.

   I would encourage you to use the end of wire resistors
for added security - particularly if this is a main alarm system (not in my
case). If you do this however there is no way you should common the inputs
to Comfort and HV - in fact I would STRONGLY advise against this even if
you abandon the EOL resistors - it is prone to all sorts of reliability and
interaction issues and may not even work. If you really must do this I
would suggest putting a small 2 pole c/o relay on each PIR and hence
provide two separate isolated outputs.

   I connect my 'professional' sytem to the rest via HV and
ACE - it is a maintained system so I can't get at everything I want so I
have some relay outputs on it that trigger on desired events and I connect
these to the port inputs on HV ( or Comfort as you wish). I also take
serial data (the alarm reporting data that is meant for a printer) and feed
that into ACE (or HV), parse it a bit to get what I want and that's about
it.

   Stay away from X10 as any 'message passing' format as
Paul said it is too slow and unreliable.

   Lastly my experience with any lighting switching via a
PIR on an alarm system used for occupancy detection is that delays are
introduced by the alarm detection, reporting, parsing and then X10
activation and that these are significant - making the effect poor (4 secs
in my case). I now use sensors that directly trigger a DIN X10 module (via
HV) to provide the ON switching and use X10 for off and occupancy
'clevers'. 
   One of the difficulties with the OFF bit is detecting
'unoccupied' (eg lying immobile on a sofa, usually with beer cans on
floor)- the BIK thread running at the moment provides one solution, clever
'in / out counting provides another, long PIR time delays the easiest but
least effective. The only disadvantage of the DIN module trigger is that
you cant do the rapid OFF to full on fade that provides greater 'wow' when
you enter a room.

   Kevin



on 27/3/01 10:29 pm, Eamon O'Gorman at eamonogorman@xxxxxxx wrote:

> I am just about to embark on wiring my new house for homevision and comfort
> and I have a query for those of you who have done this already. My problem
> is that I want to use the a mixture of inputs from homevision and comfort
> for my PIR's and door contacts to do both my motion sensing for automated
> lights and security system. Seeing as homevision does not have 9/12v dc to
> power my PIR's I will have to use the 12v outputs which comfort provides to
> power the PIR's. I reckon altogether I will have 24 separate inputs 
> available (16 from hv and 8 from comfort) to mix and match. I think I will
> need about 13 PIR's first of all, and six door contacts.. Can I power all
> of these PIR's from comfort ? While I can only use 8 inputs to comfort, I
> could still use the power from comfort to supply the other 5 PIR's ? Or is
> there a limit to the load on the 12v outputs from Comfort limiting the 
> number of PIR's I can power. What I am trying to do is avoid having to 
> purchase additional power supplies for this.
>
>  Secondly, can I common outputs from a single PIR to both comfort and
> homevision ?. Ideally, I would like to have door contacts wired to comfort
> for the security aspect of things, but it may be better to wire these to
> hv, as they do not require power. Any ideas or advice on how anyone mixed
> and matched these would be appreciated.
>
> Finally, what is the idea of having a resistor on the end of contacts for
> PIR's etc, I thought a simple N/O N/C contact would be all that was 
> required. Also, having been spoilt by homevision, anyone have any 
> suggestions on good guides to programming comfort, the manuals are pretty
> unfriendly, or maybe my mind is just getting lazy?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eamon
>
>
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