X10 Community Forum

🔌General Home Automation => Automating Your House => Topic started by: bkenobi on March 04, 2012, 01:32:43 AM

Title: Driveway sensor
Post by: bkenobi on March 04, 2012, 01:32:43 AM

Does anyone have any experience with the wand style buried driveway sensors?  I've been thinking that such a device is probably easy to integrate into my system, but I'm not sure what the inputs and outputs are from one of these devices.

http://www.diycontrols.com/c-225-wired-driveway-alerts.aspx

That page has several wired and wireless models.  I've found a conduit that's already installed and empty and run to the location I want.  If I could wire something like this to a PowerFlash (perhaps with a relay), this might be a nice way to detect visiting vehicles without tripping unnecessarily from wind, birds, bugs, ghosts, ...

FWIW, most people use these for vehicle gates either for safety zones or automatic opening.

Title: Re: Driveway sensor
Post by: Brian H on March 04, 2012, 09:23:21 AM

I don't have any data on how they work.
I looked at the units on the link.
It looks like the Dakota Alert has a switches 12 volts 500mA output. You could trigger relay or maybe directly a Powerflash.
The Winland has a pair of dry contact relay outputs that could also trigger a Powerflash.

Title: Re: Driveway sensor
Post by: bkenobi on March 04, 2012, 10:43:34 AM

I looked around to see how they worked and couldn't find anything.  Seems like the industry likes these to be a magic PVC tube.  I assume it's just a winding of some kind, but then the only way to adjust sensitivity is by adjusting input power.  I guess I'll keep looking to see if I can unlock the mysteries of the magic PVC tube and see if anyone locally sells one.