I want to do something with Vera that seems really easy but I can’t seem to find the right information. I hope you guys will help me.
I have three doors that are opened by a digital lock with fingerprint reader. Unfortunately they are not z-wave enabled. They interface with the actual motor lock through a device with digital ports, if that is the right term. They have input ports for e.g. a door bell and output ports for e.g. the motor lock. So, just connections that are opened and closed.
I want to interface these devices with Vera. They are right next to each other, so z-wave is not really necessary. It seems that USB would make the most sense.
I read about USB to Serial devices. Could I use something like that? I just want to be able to have Vera open or close a connection to open a door for example or to notify Vera when a connection closes or opens, e.g. when somebody enters the house.
The only thing I can find are very expensive z-wave devices with only one input port or one output port (like a relay). I would need about six of these which would cost me hundreds of dollars / euros.
If it’s not possible by Vera, I also have a Linux server next to it running 24/7, but I can’t even find a solution to do it with that.
Again, to me it feels like something very trivial but I just can’t find the right solution.
If you are willing to homebrew something then you can probably get something working. It’d hard to suggest anything specific without knowing more details about these “digital ports”. There are a lot of ways that electronics can do “digital” (normally-open relays that short on activation; normally-closed relays that open on activation; 0V/5V open-collector signals à la I2C or SPI that need a pull-up resistor; TTL-style 0V/5V high-impedance inputs à la op-amps; RS232 -12V/+12V;…). Maybe you can narrow down what your lock uses. Do you have any specifications or other info? The more info you can provide the better.
The cheapest way I can think of to interface a Vera to electronic circuits is through a microcontroller like an Arduino. They’re eminently programmable and have a handful of inputs and outputs that you can use to connect to your lock. Depending on the flavour of digitalness that the lock speaks, you might need one or two components, but if you have ever held a soldering iron you should be good.
I just want to be able to have Vera open or close a connection to open a door for example or to notify Vera when a connection closes or opens, e.g. when somebody enters the house.
[ul][li]Foscam FI8908/FI8908W IP camera comes with I/O ports which are accessible via http (http://www.foscam.us/sdk/FOSCAM_IPCAM_CGI_SDK_2.1.pdf): decoder_control.cgi command 94 and 95; get_status.cgi alarm_status[/li]
From what I understand, both normally-open and normally-closed outputs are provided. I think the input just needs to be closed or openen (does that make sense at all?).
I have held a soldering iron in the past, and am willing to do it again, but I prefer a pre-soldered solution if it’s available and not too expensive. The Arduino looks promising and it seems to be available preassembled for not too much money. I guess it would be easier to control this with my Linux box than with Vera directly, right?
[quote=“ncherry, post:4, topic:167415”]Add to the list a $35 (US - you still need a power supply and case):
That looks even easier and very cheap! So, output is controlled by URLs, I guess I can call these easily from LUUP, right? It says it puts 5V on the output, should I use a relay to open or close my output? And how about input, how would I get that into Vera? Any thoughts?
Last problem is getting it in The Netherlands. Amazon won’t ship it there so I probably should ask someone in the US to send it to me. Anyway, that is probably the easiest part.
Short answer is that you should be able to do in/out with Lua. I haven’t tried.
I would recommend putting a driver chip on the output to drive relays (I don’t recall the drive capability of the Webcontrol) and a power supply with more current capability (7.5 - 12v DC, ???Amps). I’ve see some Lua code for accessing URLs so I expect that you should be able to set the output and get the info on the input. I haven’t tried it yet as I am still learning about the Vera. I haven’t added the Webcontrol to my network yet, I also need to pick a power supply and a few more LEDs and switches.
DUDE, I’ve been looking for something like this… looks like input contacts can trigger an e-mail? Can it also wget a http address when the input contacts are shorted?
That’s exactly what I was wondering, too. I can’t find this functionality in the documentation. So you would either have to poll the WebControl to see if an input or output has changed, or have some way to process the e-mail. Probably this is easy with postfix or sendmail, but it would mean depending on a server. I assume Vera can’t receive and process e-mails?
Brilliant, that’s all the information I needed. Yes, looks like the outputs are relays with both N/C and N/O pins, and the inputs are N/O pins that you just have to short to trigger.
I think you’ve got better options from others now, but for completeness, and in case anyone searches this thread later:
The Arduino looks promising and it seems to be available preassembled for not too much money. I guess it would be easier to control this with my Linux box than with Vera directly, right?
It’s about the same. Arduinos by default present themselves as a USB-serial port, so anything that can talk serial can talk to an Arduino. That includes desktop Linux boxes as well as little embedded Linux boxes like Vera.
There are a multitude of boards (“shields”) you can piggyback onto an Arduino. Here is one that has relays built into it: SeeedStudio Arduino Relay Shield. You might not need any soldering at all.
Finally, I see that your Secure I/O has an RS-485 port. That might make something like this possible if you know the protocol or can reverse-engineer it: USB-RS485 Communications Module. (Edit: except you’re probably already using that port, so never mind.)
I have no affiliation with either of the companies I’ve linked to, and I’ve never bought from them.
I just started it up, I found a power supply (basically staring me in the face, on the table in front of me :-[ ). I’ll play around with it and see what it can do. I don’t know where my 18B20s are so I won’t be able to add any right now. I’ll need to figure out the drive of the LVX4245 chip (sounds like a '245 type chip, might be 3 - 5v buffer).
On the subject of Arduino, a JeeNode is a great option. I can confirm that the usb JeeLink is recognized by Vera as a serial device. That’s as far as I got. I’m sure one of the addon plugs will do what you need. Coincidently they are shipped from the Netherlands!
[quote=“robcb85, post:12, topic:167415”]On the subject of Arduino, a JeeNode is a great option. I can confirm that the usb JeeLink is recognized by Vera as a serial device. That’s as far as I got. I’m sure one of the addon plugs will do what you need. Coincidently they are shipped from the Netherlands!
I just started it up, I found a power supply (basically staring me in the face, on the table in front of me :-[ ). I’ll play around with it and see what it can do. I don’t know where my 18B20s are so I won’t be able to add any right now. I’ll need to figure out the drive of the LVX4245 chip (sounds like a '245 type chip, might be 3 - 5v buffer).[/quote]
Not to be outdone by everyone else, I found out the LVX4245 is indeed a 3v to 5v buffer and can driver 24mA. I also put together the information below and I’ll post it tomorrow on my US Home Automation web site as WebControl:
Here are the documents in one file (.tar.gz - gzip’d and tar’d). The file contains:
I’m not sure which files are which. One interesting thing to note. The main web page uses ajax to update the status of each interface. That can become a standard interface to the and would look something like this:
Thanks for the reminder, I saw that before (need a wire to be soldered on to make the temperature probes more reliable). Now I just need to find out more about that mod to the board. I’ll add it to the page as well.
[quote=“robcb85, post:12, topic:167415”]On the subject of Arduino, a JeeNode is a great option. I can confirm that the usb JeeLink is recognized by Vera as a serial device. That’s as far as I got. I’m sure one of the addon plugs will do what you need. Coincidently they are shipped from the Netherlands!
Thanks for the tip, I will definitely look into that.
I will post back here if I have some results. Thanks again for all the help, everyone! By the way, I posted some more JeeNode specific questions on this subject here: http://talk.jeelabs.net/topic/768
What I haven’t been able to figure out from the docs on both the serio and the jeenode (probably haven’t looked close enough) is the input events. Do either of these boards spit data back when an input is “tripped”? I saw that you can read an input, but I don’t want to read on interval - I want immediate response.
I think how it works is that you can do the polling on the JeeNode and send an event back to Vera somehow (I haven’t figured out that part yet). If you make the polling interval small enough, the response will be “immediate”.
Usually it’s not appropriate to respond to yourself but I found the board mod and I’ll document it on my WebControl page. It’s a rather easy fix. You need to cut the 3.3v feed to a diode (it’s 3 legged so it looks like a transistor to me) and apply 5v there instead (from the same spot on the humidity sensor’s diode).