Re: X-10 Mister House Motion sensor problems

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Interesting.  I will be powering it up as soon as I can find the coax
>required to make the connection.  IIRC, RG59 and RG6 had the wrong
>impedance.  I should be looking for 50 Ohm cable to use with the BX-AHT and
>your "eggbeater" antenna design, correct?

Yes.

>> If you want better motion detection, use the X-10 security motion
>detector.
>> I've found it to be several orders of magnitude more reliable that the
>> EagleEye or HawkEye. I've had one for 4-5 years and am still on the
>initial
>> battery. The BX24-AHT will also report RF from the door/window switches.
>
>That's the big round sucker, right?  The Robodog comes with a similar
>version but alas, it too got squirrel happy.  It might even be the reason I
>got married - my then GF got such a kick out of the fact that an electric
>dog would bark at real birds and squirrels.

No.

     http://www.x10.com/products/x10_ms10a.htm

>> One of theses days I will adapt the PIC I programmed as a generic ADC RF
>> input node to use the transmitter in the door/window switch. Jeff Volp
>> suggested doing something similar with an EagleEye or Hawkeye but I think
>> the door/window switches are better for this. They're about $10 each in a
>> 3-pack.
>
>Why do you prefer the door/window switches?

There's more room inside the case for mounting a small daughterboard with a
PIC on it.

>> BTW, my plans to port the AHT code to the ZX-24 are on indefinite hold.
>I've
>> come to the conclusion that the ZX-24 isn't really ready for use by anyone
>> other than experimenters. I'm afraid the support burden would be
>> overwhelming.
>
>That's a reasonable choice.  With a viable whole house controller I can
>create my own "select your own house code" option via an Ocelot translating
>codes I enter and using an escape sequence so the the requirement of a more
>configureable AHT has slackened somewhat.  Thanks for thinking about it,
>anyway.  The discussion alone cleared up some misconceptions I had about the
>way the remote actually worked.  I somehow expected it to output RF as well
>as IR for every button press simultaneously.

You really haven't grasped yet what you can do with the BX24-AHT. The
advantage of using the ZX-24 was that it's software UARTs are always active
in the background so it can deal with multiple, simultaneous I/O streams.
The configurability enhancements are not major.