alarmdecoder.com

Greetings!

I've had my AD2Serial for a few weeks now, and I'm loving it.

It's hooked to an Opengear ACM5000 box, which has a nice mechanism for kicking off responses to serial input based on regex matches.

For example, I've got my front door zone configured to close a (virtual) relay in the AD2Serial as described elsewhere around here. When the Opengear sees !REL:12,01,01 (front door open relay action), it kicks off a script that sleeps for 5 minutes, then sends me a text message.

When the front door closes, the Opengear sees !REL:12,01,00 (front door close relay action), so it kicks off a different script that kills the first one, hopefully before the first script has gotten around to sending the text message.

If the front door stands open for 5 minutes, I get a text message telling me that somebody's left the front door open.

Nifty!

Now, the front door zone is wired directly to my panel (a Vista 20P). I'm using the zone-triggers-virutal-relay panel configuration technique because that's the only way to get contact closure data from these zones onto the keypad bus.

I've got a 4229 expander that I'll be adding to the system soon. Most of the zones on this expander are not things that I want the alarm to act on. For example, my Vista20P isn't going to do anything in response to the mail being delivered, but I'd like my computer to log that event.

I'm thinking of putting the 4229 on the keypad bus (using a unique address), but not configuring most of these zones in the panel. Instead, these new zones will monitor things that my computer is interested in, but which the panel is not.

I assume that the panel will ignore fault/clear events for zones it doesn't care about, and that the AD2Serial will report on all events from this expander whether the panel takes an action or not.

Do I have that right?

Is there any downside to having fault/clear events on zones which haven't been programmed in the panel?

Can I still use some of the 4229 zones (and relays) in the panel, while using the others to monitor events that only the AD2Serial will care about?

Excellent post thanks for that.

Yes: It is not necessary to program all or any of the zones on an expander and still receive EXP messages and any expander or rf sensor zone that opens/closes that is not programmed into the panel is ignored by the panel. I use 5800MICRA sensors all the time to monitor stuff in the house that I dont need my alarm to worry about.

No: Only upsides exist. Using expanders or RFX expanders for zones that are not part of the panel is an excellent and inexpensive way to add sensors to your system and not bother with the security side of things.

Yes: The EXP messages can be used regardless of how they are configured in the panel. I however don't know of a way to open/close a relay via the AD2* other than triggering a zone that has an output attached to it. This is not impossible but would require tricking the relay into thinking it was told to open a relay from the AD2* and that code does not currently exist in the firmware.

We are adding similar features into our new open source WebApp for the Ad2Pi or your own embedded controller or computer that will notify based upon specific messages such as !EXP or !RFX. Some of the advanced stuff you are doing with the timing and ladder logic is on a future revision and already being considered so its good to hear we are looking in the same direction for features.

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Sean M

Thanks very much for the reply, Sean.

I don't have a use case for triggering a relay from the computer (yet). When I do, I guess it'll just be a matter of faulting a (virtual) zone, and then having the panel react to it with *79 and *80 configuration?

I can live with that.

Frankly, I'm thinking about moving my existing hardwired zones off of the main panel, and onto zone expanders so that the AD2Serial can monitor them directly. Doing so would make room for some AD2Serial actuated relays...

Ya thats what I have done myself in many cases to get more visibility using expanders. Yep just program them in *79 and *80 and a few other menus exist such as zone lists etc that may come in handy. The inability to get granular control of zones when armed is a bit of a pain on Ademco panels but zonetracking as done by our opensource API does help a little. The DSC firmware for the AD2* treats all zones as expander zones just in the way DSC does messaging on the bus it just works. Ademco messages re restricted from the panel and visibility of the onboard zone data is only sent under specific conditions.

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Sean M

Sean, I didn't understand all of this. Would you please clarify?

mathewss wrote:The inability to get granular control of zones when armed is a bit of a pain

By "control of zones" do you mean get reports of their status? As far as I'm aware, we can only wait for status to change, had better be listening when it does.

What's the "when armed" limitation? Does the *79/*80 virtual relay triggering not work when the panel is armed?

pp6knjoR5puA8eps wrote:Sean, I didn't understand all of this. Would you please clarify?

mathewss wrote:The inability to get granular control of zones when armed is a bit of a pain

By "control of zones" do you mean get reports of their status? As far as I'm aware, we can only wait for status to change, had better be listening when it does.

What's the "when armed" limitation? Does the *79/*80 virtual relay triggering not work when the panel is armed?

Its hit and miss. I have had it work on some panels and not work on others. I can not say right now 100% how it will go. It seems to depend on the zone type.

By granular control i am talking about seeing a zone close when a door closes. No "ZONE RESTORE" messages exist on Ademco only faults. To determine if one of the onboard 7 zones closes it requires some logic to watch for missing "FAULT ZONE XX" message.

This is not a concern for expander zones or RFX zones as we see them 100% every time open/close regardless of the alarm state.

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Sean M

The *79/*80 virtual relay stuff is hit and miss when the panel is armed? Zoinks!

I've only got a handful of hardwired zones (stuff I could easily access from my unfinished basement). It sounds like I should just migrate all of these to physical zone expanders.

Thanks for the heads up about that issue.