RE: PIR's

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Alex,

I went the X10 route about a year ago... and I haven't needed to replace th= e batteries yet (used Duracell). However, these are in rooms with very litt= le movement.

With X10, you have the latency problem of sending an X10 message before you= can act on anything. As such, my goal is to move to beam-break + PIR.

In an ideal world, I'd use hard-wired PIRs, in may case, back to HomeVision= . I guess that a lot hinges on whether you've got suitable wiring in place.=

Finally, I keep the PIRs for the security system (which ARE hard-wired) com= pletely separate from those I use for HA. I can cope with HA being unreliab= le (1 or 2 times a year). I don't want the alarm being that unreliable.

Regards,

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Monaghan [mailto:alex@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 30 August 2002 16:07
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx Subject: [ukha_d] PIR's


I'm in the process of rewiring and making the new installation X10 & ge= neral
HA ready.

I've been toying with the idea of having PIR's in rooms to generate trigger= s
so that I can activate lights or even generate an alarm. Not knowing much about PIR's (other than they can detect movement and are generally used on<= BR> alarm systems), I'm after a bit of advise.

I'm looking at 2 options,

The 1st being the RF based X10 devices, this would be easy to detect on a P= C
via the CM12 interface and necessary X10 RF interface, but these are =A330<= BR> each and 14 of these - big house :-) wouldn't be cheap.
How long is battery life in these units ?

Alternatively, how easy is it to interface some ordinary burglar alarm type=
of PIR's (Maplin, Screwfix etc... have these at =A310 each) to a PC (it'll = be
running a flavour of UNIX or BSD and a simple bit of software development would be acceptable if needed)

Is it easy to distinguish a small movement from a large movement, for
example rolling over in bed or sitting up and getting out of bed to go for = a
pee ? If the light came on every time the SWMBO rolled over I'd very quickl= y
have to start uninstalling the HA stuff :-( but if a there was nice dimmed<= BR> light route to the bathroom, then some real benefit from HA could be seen and I get to keep my toys :-)

Any suggestions or pointers to web sites ?



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