Driveway Sensor DIY Z-wave

Other Devices & Integrations Door Locks & Sensors
41

That sounds good. You should be able to use the Everspring window/door sensor to link that driveway alert to z-wave by wiring it to leads 7 and 8 as Richard describes. The driveway alert sounds like it is a more robust version of the simpler Dakota alert.

I put in ground loop sensors before having driveway paved for the purpose of connecting them to electric driveway gate. The gate set up will be several grand, so it hasn’t happened yet. This has got me hopeful that when I do get the gate installed with the opener that I’ll be able to connect a z-wave sensor into the system and be able to access the three ground loop detectors.

42

This is great stuff!

I just got my Sonos Plugin figured out so I have scenes setup with voice announcements. I’d like to integrate a driveway sensor but I will need a beam/motion type instead of burial.

Might try this http://www.amazon.com/Dakota-Alert-Break-Beam/dp/B0083OAASM/ref=pd_cp_p_0
or
This http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Motion-Alert-Kit-600-Range/dp/B000AOMO50/ref=reg_hu-rd_add_1_dp

43

How’s your dakota transmitter unit holding up to the elements?

Reviews on Amazon seem mixed. Little concerned here in the North East as to how well these hold up

44

I live in Tx … Weather is not to cold … I have not hit the hot part of the year yet.

I had quit getting alerts one day … I have had to reset the power on the Receiver to correct.

45

I work at a company that assembles electronic printed circuit boards. I will likely take the board out and have it conformal coated to protect it from the elements.

I was thinking since I have 12vdc landscape lights, I could find a way to permanently power the transmitter as well…

46

Many thanks to triangledave, RichardTSchaefer and others on this post for the help and pointers to create a driveway monitoring and lighting system.

We now have successfully placed two Dakota-Alert sensors (one 2500 and one 3000) at the start and end of the driveway along with an Everspring window/door sensor each. Different Dakota used because of price breaks I found and I needed one that could send signals over 700 feet (the 2500 works 100% so far do this through a forest and up a steep hill!).

With the plug-in (Program Logic Event Generator) and this hardware in place all works as planned. Live in Oregon so we will see how well the hardware stands up to the wet we get here!

Cheers all

47

Got all my parts, can’t wait to get it going with the Sonos Plugin to voice announce “You have a visitor”

48

Thanks for all the all the “R&D” for getting this up and running.

I now have my Sonos say “someone is here” once the driveway sensor is tripped and it works great.
I’d like to turn on a few lights too if it’s after dusk, any suggestions as to how would I go about doing that?
(I’m somewhat new to scenes…)

49
I now have my Sonos say "someone is here" once the driveway sensor is tripped and it works great.
Have you installed PLEG ? Or did you do it with a Scene ?
50

I have PLEG installed but I did the Sonos announcement with a scene…

51

You can do another scene for the lights … and trigger with the driveway sensor.

Add:return luup.is_night()
to the Trigger for the scene.

Or you can do both with a Single PLEG device:
Input:
DrivewayMotion When your Driveway sensor detects activity
Night When Day or Night indicates Night

Conditions:
AnyDriveActivity DrivewayMotion
NightDriveActivityOn DrivewayMotion and NIGHT
NightDriveActivtyOff NightDriveActivityOn; NOW > 10:00

Actions:
AnyDriveActivity Use the advanced tab to send a Say command to Sonos
NightDriveActivityOn Turn on Driveway lights
NightDriveActivtyOff Turn off Driveway Lights

52

Thanks Richard…

what does the “NOW > 10:00” do?

Also, what you refer to as “driveway lights” would I simply replace that with the device name I am trying to control, i.e “porch light”
NightDriveActivityOn Turn on Driveway lights
NightDriveActivtyOff Turn off Driveway Lights

53
what does the "NOW > 10:00" do?
When you have a condition expression that uses NOW ... It is evaluated once per minute.

In this case we have a sequence expression:
NightDriveActivityOn; NOW > 10:00

This condition will be true when the current time (NOW) is 10 minutes past when NightDriveActivity became true. (Because this is only evaluated once per minute … it could take from 10:00 to 10:59 minutes to actually fire).

would I simply replace that with the device name I am trying to control, i.e "porch light"
Yes ... each action is like a scene ... that is fired when the associated condition first becomes true. Put what ever commands you like in the Action ... I did not know what your devices were called ... I have driveway lights and Porch lights! You must have the PLEG enabled for actions to fire!
54

Finally got all the pieces today and began the installation.
How far from the road are people installing the magnet? I’m a bit over 10’ and it seems to be picking up some passing traffic.

55

I used the Blue Iris plugin to add support for one of my Chinese 3MP cameras and then hooked up a Vera Alert notification that sends me a picture of when the sensor is tripped, very cool!
The templating is helpful too, changed the message to:
{Picture(411)}{Subject=VERA: Vehicle Sensor Alert}

56

I’ve been looking for exactly this solution–fantastic work! I’m looking at the 2500 break beam and receiver and noticed that it says multiple beam sets can be set up with each receiver. We have a couple of places these would be useful, but would need to be able to differentiate which beam was tripped. Is this possible with one receiver and multiple door sensors, or do we need multiple receivers?

57

With regards to the most recent posts, if I am remembering correctly, the receiver can handle 4 signal sources and differentiate tones for each one. However, you will likely need an everspring sensor for each of the sources (connected at the receiver to each of the out ports) in order to differentiate sources in vera. You might be able to run all 4 leads to one everspring unit if you did not need to differentiate.

I’ve thought about something similar with my doorbell for a video alert. My NVR has alarm out and alarm in ports. At some point, I am going to try and use on of the alarm in ports tied to vera so that if the doorbell rings, my NVR sends me an alert with a pic. I know the NVR can do this, I just don’t know if it can do it the way that I want.

Also on my list are adding another driveway sensor 30-40 ft separate from my existing one to be able to have vera differentiate between a car arriving or departing.

My final big project is to either get my sqremote plugin fully set up (too bad that company went away–great product) or use Roomie remote (more powerful, but clunky set up at best if you want to do any customization). I want to set it up so that if someone rings the doorbell, my TV pauses, switches to camera feed for 20-30 seconds, then goes back to TV and resumes play again.

Not sure if anyone is still needing info on the earlier posts in this thread, but I thought I’d post an update. The fix ended up being a simple one. On the dakota receiver, there are a NO and NC. It is obvious in hind site, but they stand for normally open and normally closed. I wired the driveway alert (and a separate doorbell with different reciever, but both Dakota Alert) into the normally open port. This gives me the green running guy icon unless the sensor is tripped, then you get the red guy.

Both the driveway alert and doorbell have been working fine for years. I have the driveway alert set to blink the lights in the basement and in our TV room. These are two places where you cannot hear someone pulling up.

I have the doorbell set up to also blink the lights with the addition of the lights in our bedroom.

So far the system has been rock solid, which is one of the reasons for long gaps in being on the forum.

I’ll keep checking more regularly and if there is any help I can offer with my simple set up, please feel free to ask.

58

[quote=“triangledave”]With regards to the most recent posts, if I am remembering correctly, the receiver can handle 4 signal sources and differentiate tones for each one. However, you will likely need an everspring sensor for each of the sources (connected at the receiver to each of the out ports) in order to differentiate sources in vera. You might be able to run all 4 leads to one everspring unit if you did not need to differentiate.

I’ve thought about something similar with my doorbell for a video alert. My NVR has alarm out and alarm in ports. At some point, I am going to try and use on of the alarm in ports tied to vera so that if the doorbell rings, my NVR sends me an alert with a pic. I know the NVR can do this, I just don’t know if it can do it the way that I want.

Also on my list are adding another driveway sensor 30-40 ft separate from my existing one to be able to have vera differentiate between a car arriving or departing.

My final big project is to either get my sqremote plugin fully set up (too bad that company went away–great product) or use Roomie remote (more powerful, but clunky set up at best if you want to do any customization). I want to set it up so that if someone rings the doorbell, my TV pauses, switches to camera feed for 20-30 seconds, then goes back to TV and resumes play again.

Not sure if anyone is still needing info on the earlier posts in this thread, but I thought I’d post an update. The fix ended up being a simple one. On the dakota receiver, there are a NO and NC. It is obvious in hind site, but they stand for normally open and normally closed. I wired the driveway alert (and a separate doorbell with different reciever, but both Dakota Alert) into the normally open port. This gives me the green running guy icon unless the sensor is tripped, then you get the red guy.

Both the driveway alert and doorbell have been working fine for years. I have the driveway alert set to blink the lights in the basement and in our TV room. These are two places where you cannot hear someone pulling up.

I have the doorbell set up to also blink the lights with the addition of the lights in our bedroom.

So far the system has been rock solid, which is one of the reasons for long gaps in being on the forum.

I’ll keep checking more regularly and if there is any help I can offer with my simple set up, please feel free to ask.[/quote]

Check out mysensors.org… your options become limitless for cheap :slight_smile:

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

59

Just wanted to say thanks to all that contributed to this thread (I know it’s old, but still…).

Just finished setting up the Dakota system. Now whenever someone pulls into our driveway, I get notified via Vera Alerts (including a 5 sec video of the camera overviewing the driveway), my 3 Sonos zones alert via a spoken message in all rooms, Tasker on my phone shows the driveway camera on the phone and also pushes the camera stream to my Android Wear watch. Can’t get much more complete than that I think :slight_smile:

60

[quote=“indianl, post:59, topic:170764”]Just wanted to say thanks to all that contributed to this thread (I know it’s old, but still…).

Just finished setting up the Dakota system. Now whenever someone pulls into our driveway, I get notified via Vera Alerts (including a 5 sec video of the camera overviewing the driveway), my 3 Sonos zones alert via a spoken message in all rooms, Tasker on my phone shows the driveway camera on the phone and also pushes the camera stream to my Android Wear watch. Can’t get much more complete than that I think :-)[/quote]

Boom, that is epic!