Post by Russel on Dec 14, 2017 16:26:38 GMT 8
You hear story after story of people having the garage door open and popping the house for something only to come back a couple minutes later and find their bike or tools stolen.
Kerui can cater for this if you have a PIR in your garage as you can turn the garage zone into a Doorbell or Welcome chime if triggered.
Pitfalls of Kerui;
1. You have to set the zone everytime you leave the garage and come back.
2. You can only hear the welcome or chime if you are close enough to the Kerui alarm box.
3. The intruder is already seen inside your garage.
There also the option of Kit IR beam sensors like you find in shop doorways
Pitfalls;
1. The sensors are wired.
2. The chime speaker is also wired to the sensors so again you are limited to being near to the speaker.
It took abit of thinking and not thinking but I come up with what I wanted from a system.
1. To be alerted when a car or person come up the driveway but not our cat or the neighbour's dog (which visits sometimes).
2. To be permanently working so I get alerted in the day when I am working from home or at night when I asleep.
3. Because of the distance I didn't want to use battery power on the transmitter because distances decreases rapidly as batteries drain.
4. The speaker to be portable. So where ever I am the speaker is in my pocket or sitting in hearing range.
5. To be cheap to build.
I already new I could get a pair or IR gate sensor on ebay cheap ($5USD) coz I bought 2 kits a couple of years ago and never did anything with them.
The missing link to the whole thing and what makes this special was already in my house in operation for over a year. The wireless doorbell kit I have bought from a big department store for ($7.50USD)
It couldn't have fallen better for me. The doorbell uses a 12V battery. That means you press the button the microswitch applies 12v to the circuit board and the sensors also run on 12V so all I need to do was take the 12v from the sensor when it triggered and apply it to the doorbell switch leg that normally would receive the 12v from the battery when pressed and boom the WIRELESS door bell chimes.
In the back of my mind I was worried about cabling cost a little, but it turns out the current is small, I turned to CAT6 cabling (cat5 or cat5e would have done too) coz I have 300 meters of it for my which I bought in bulk costing me only $0.20USD a meter. I new conduit was going to be cheap too.
The worst part of the job came from the trench for the conduit, both me and my neighbour have cocus palm trees along the fence if anyone knows anything about palm tree roots, you will know where that headed BLISTERS, SWEARING, BROKEN BACK, BROKEN SHOVEL, MORE SWEARING. Man the beer tasted good that afternoon.
In the end the trench got dug, the conduit got laid, the CAT6 cable got pulled through and up into the roof and to the point where I would supply power and place the doorbell buzzer.
I used a 12v 1A power supply pack from an old modem. The CAT cable has 8 wires which are twisted into pairs, I joined the twisted pairs together so I end up with 4 runs. I ran +ve and -ve from the plug pack on 2 of the 4 pairs and on the 3rd pair I ran 12v down to the COM terminal and 4th one up to the other terminal on the sensor which was my return wire from for the doorbell button.
My masterplan to have the doorbell button down near the sensors, but it turned out to be quiet big and stood out on the fence line which disappointment me until I realised how much better bringing it up to the house meant. The signal from the doorbell button was going to be super strong around the house now it was centalised instead of down the end of the driveway.
Job done!
List of materials and costs which I've used USD as everyone roughly knows how many USD to their currency is.
1. Wireless door bell kit $7.5 (from department local store in home good electrical section)
2. IR Sensor from ebay (search IR beam sensor) $5
3. Cat cabling (make sure it's solid core, not stranded) price will vary depending how much you buy I bought 305m Cat6 solid core off ebay for $55 including delivery. I used around 30 meters so $6.
4. Conduit pipe straight runs $2.5 per 4meters, angle bends (make sure you buy telecommuncation bends which have wider bends) $1 ea. End junctions $2ea
5. Conduit glue for waterproofing $3
6. Silicone glue tube I ran CAT cable from one side of the driveway to the other in the concrete groove $3.5
7. 12V 1A power supply (free from old modem)
8. Carton of beer to assist with dig through palm roots for trench $38
Total cost $38.5 + (optional beer $38) = $76USD
TEETHING ISSUES;
1. My fence is stupid wavy hardy fence I chose not to mount it to the fence (yet) and the sensor was tripping for no apparent reason. After looking through the lenses of the beam sensor eye and remembering from a couple nights before I had used my camera on my phone to look at the IR at night I realised the IR Led on looks out a very small hole and the wind was knocking the sensor out of target of the other sensor even though they looked closed enough.. they weren't!
2. Being the prototype I just wanted to get the thing ticking and didn't bother fusing anything. I did worry about this at night and when I was away from the house. It's all fused now.
3. One of the 3 AA batteries died in the wireless door bell unit during testing which left me scratching my head for abit what I had done while I fiddling with the wiring. Lucky I had my battery tester to hand.
4. Morning Sunrise - It's summer and whilst the sun is low and rising in the morning it shines directly into the receiver IR unit and disrupts the beam causing the doorbell to go off continuously until the sun rises far enough to be more overhead. I may need to build a visor.
Edit 30 Dec 2017 - I found a work around to the sunrise issue setting off the IR sensors. More thoughts had initially been on replacing the cheaper IR sensors with more expensive models, but today I realised a simple 240v 24hour power timer on the 12v power plug pack at the wall socket will sort it out. I have a few sitting around and it took less than a minute to put it in and set the timing to turn off the power for the 2 hour period when the sun was hitting the sensor and turning it on for the other 22 hours a day.
Kerui can cater for this if you have a PIR in your garage as you can turn the garage zone into a Doorbell or Welcome chime if triggered.
Pitfalls of Kerui;
1. You have to set the zone everytime you leave the garage and come back.
2. You can only hear the welcome or chime if you are close enough to the Kerui alarm box.
3. The intruder is already seen inside your garage.
There also the option of Kit IR beam sensors like you find in shop doorways
Pitfalls;
1. The sensors are wired.
2. The chime speaker is also wired to the sensors so again you are limited to being near to the speaker.
It took abit of thinking and not thinking but I come up with what I wanted from a system.
1. To be alerted when a car or person come up the driveway but not our cat or the neighbour's dog (which visits sometimes).
2. To be permanently working so I get alerted in the day when I am working from home or at night when I asleep.
3. Because of the distance I didn't want to use battery power on the transmitter because distances decreases rapidly as batteries drain.
4. The speaker to be portable. So where ever I am the speaker is in my pocket or sitting in hearing range.
5. To be cheap to build.
I already new I could get a pair or IR gate sensor on ebay cheap ($5USD) coz I bought 2 kits a couple of years ago and never did anything with them.
The missing link to the whole thing and what makes this special was already in my house in operation for over a year. The wireless doorbell kit I have bought from a big department store for ($7.50USD)
It couldn't have fallen better for me. The doorbell uses a 12V battery. That means you press the button the microswitch applies 12v to the circuit board and the sensors also run on 12V so all I need to do was take the 12v from the sensor when it triggered and apply it to the doorbell switch leg that normally would receive the 12v from the battery when pressed and boom the WIRELESS door bell chimes.
In the back of my mind I was worried about cabling cost a little, but it turns out the current is small, I turned to CAT6 cabling (cat5 or cat5e would have done too) coz I have 300 meters of it for my which I bought in bulk costing me only $0.20USD a meter. I new conduit was going to be cheap too.
The worst part of the job came from the trench for the conduit, both me and my neighbour have cocus palm trees along the fence if anyone knows anything about palm tree roots, you will know where that headed BLISTERS, SWEARING, BROKEN BACK, BROKEN SHOVEL, MORE SWEARING. Man the beer tasted good that afternoon.
In the end the trench got dug, the conduit got laid, the CAT6 cable got pulled through and up into the roof and to the point where I would supply power and place the doorbell buzzer.
I used a 12v 1A power supply pack from an old modem. The CAT cable has 8 wires which are twisted into pairs, I joined the twisted pairs together so I end up with 4 runs. I ran +ve and -ve from the plug pack on 2 of the 4 pairs and on the 3rd pair I ran 12v down to the COM terminal and 4th one up to the other terminal on the sensor which was my return wire from for the doorbell button.
My masterplan to have the doorbell button down near the sensors, but it turned out to be quiet big and stood out on the fence line which disappointment me until I realised how much better bringing it up to the house meant. The signal from the doorbell button was going to be super strong around the house now it was centalised instead of down the end of the driveway.
Job done!
List of materials and costs which I've used USD as everyone roughly knows how many USD to their currency is.
1. Wireless door bell kit $7.5 (from department local store in home good electrical section)
2. IR Sensor from ebay (search IR beam sensor) $5
3. Cat cabling (make sure it's solid core, not stranded) price will vary depending how much you buy I bought 305m Cat6 solid core off ebay for $55 including delivery. I used around 30 meters so $6.
4. Conduit pipe straight runs $2.5 per 4meters, angle bends (make sure you buy telecommuncation bends which have wider bends) $1 ea. End junctions $2ea
5. Conduit glue for waterproofing $3
6. Silicone glue tube I ran CAT cable from one side of the driveway to the other in the concrete groove $3.5
7. 12V 1A power supply (free from old modem)
8. Carton of beer to assist with dig through palm roots for trench $38
Total cost $38.5 + (optional beer $38) = $76USD
TEETHING ISSUES;
1. My fence is stupid wavy hardy fence I chose not to mount it to the fence (yet) and the sensor was tripping for no apparent reason. After looking through the lenses of the beam sensor eye and remembering from a couple nights before I had used my camera on my phone to look at the IR at night I realised the IR Led on looks out a very small hole and the wind was knocking the sensor out of target of the other sensor even though they looked closed enough.. they weren't!
2. Being the prototype I just wanted to get the thing ticking and didn't bother fusing anything. I did worry about this at night and when I was away from the house. It's all fused now.
3. One of the 3 AA batteries died in the wireless door bell unit during testing which left me scratching my head for abit what I had done while I fiddling with the wiring. Lucky I had my battery tester to hand.
4. Morning Sunrise - It's summer and whilst the sun is low and rising in the morning it shines directly into the receiver IR unit and disrupts the beam causing the doorbell to go off continuously until the sun rises far enough to be more overhead. I may need to build a visor.
Edit 30 Dec 2017 - I found a work around to the sunrise issue setting off the IR sensors. More thoughts had initially been on replacing the cheaper IR sensors with more expensive models, but today I realised a simple 240v 24hour power timer on the 12v power plug pack at the wall socket will sort it out. I have a few sitting around and it took less than a minute to put it in and set the timing to turn off the power for the 2 hour period when the sun was hitting the sensor and turning it on for the other 22 hours a day.