Room occupancy detection and door opening/closing - 1-wire or wireless solution?

["dermot_bradley" <bradley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to detect room occupancy and
doors being opened/closed from a PC.

I already have 4-core telephone cable round around various rooms and
I'm in the process of soldering 1-wire temperature sensors to this so
it would make sense to use this if possible.

One easy way to wire up magnetic door sensors seems to be to use a EDS
D2PC "low cost 2 channel digital I/O 1-wire card" (as sold by
Homechip) to connect the magnetic sensors to the 1-wire network.

As for PIR sensors, I've not yet found a easy way to use them with
1-wire, mainly due to the requirement for power for the PIRs.

I guess I could use a battery powered PIR and wire the contacts to a
D2PC for 1-wire connection.

Alternatively I could buy some Visonic wireless PIRs and their
Powercode receiver to convert the PIR wireless signals to seperate dry
contacts and then connect these to D2PC and on to the 1-wire network.

Has anyone on the list tried this sort of thing before? Anyone have
comments or alternative suggestions?

Basically I'm intended to use the PIRs and door contacts so that a
program on my homeserver PC can control lights and appliances (i.e.
turn on room lights after X minutes of no movement).

I haven't decided what to use for light and appliance control yet
either (that's a whole other isseu) but will probably go with Homeeasy
or Domia.



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