Driveway sensor

[bkenobi]

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.

[Brian H]

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.

[bkenobi]

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.