external alarm systems/panels/sensors talk to ZM in various ways,
and also a lot of work in order to make ZM communicate via X10 with
other home electrical devices/panels/appliances.
What a lot of people is still looking for, and keeping an eye on, is
ways to integrate ZM with alarm security solutions, making ZM report
alarms to a panel located in the house, thus offloading the job of communications/actions in case of alarm, to the alarm panel, which is
designed to do exactly this.
I have been looking at GPIO with the LMLBT4M, but unfortunately GPIO
for linux is not yet in the official kernel, the patch from LML is not even applied to their own LiveCDs, and eitherway my OS of choice is FreeBSD,
so i had to focus on that. BKTR GPIO with FreeBSD theoritically works,
i was able to enable the GPIO, write and read data from the data register,
and everything looked great, except the fact that on the electrical level
i didnt get the behaviour i would like, in order to connect one output
to the aux. input of a visonic MCT302T wireless magnetic contact sensor.
So i abandoned the GPIO idea. One nice guy from the freebsd-hardware camp, suggested that i used one old modem phone jack acting as alarm relay.
MCT302T circuit has a EOL resistor 47KOhm, (battery is 3V) allowing
it to work both with Normally Open (N/O) and Normally
Closed (N/C) contacts.
When trying the N/O wiring (in parallel with the
resistor), i noticed that even with the modem switch
off, i got a short on the circuit, i saw the light
flashing on the xmitter, effectively telling the alarm
panel that "the zone is open", and putting the alarm
panel to "Not Ready" state.
The same behaviour after an ATH0.
Now after a ATH1, (still on N/O wiring), i noticed
that the circuit went back to normal current, and the
alarm panel was reporting "Ready" state.
So, in order to achieve the complementary results, i
tried with N/C wiring (in series with the resistor).
Now the alarm reports "Ready", when the phone jack is
in plugged in, regardless of whether the modem is on
power or not, which means that the current in the
circuit is normal, while the panel reports "Zone Open"
whenever i issue ATH1, which could mean the circuit
is cut.
I got a ZyXEL U-1496 old modem, and i think that it
behaves by opening the circuit after ATH1, closing the
circuit after ATH0.
I have a perl script which polls ZoneMinder shared
mem,
and triggers the alarm thru a call to vm (from
vgetty).
the vm program is like:
vm shell -l cuad1 -S offhook_onhook.pl
where offhook_onhook.pl, issues ATH1, sleeps 2 secs,
issues ATH0.
offhook_onhook.pl is:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use Modem::Vgetty;
my $v = new Modem::Vgetty;
$v->device('DIALUP_LINE');
$v->send("ATH1");
sleep(2);
$v->send("ATH0");
so now i have the perl testing for alarms acting as a new Zone to the powermax+!!!
In the logic of the alarm polling perl which is similar to this
(BTW people please correct the first SQL in the above wiki page, its wrong)
i can e.g. easily exclude the front door camera from activating the powermax+, or theoritically have it just do what it takes for the exact situation.
I dont know about the legal details on if this is allowed or not in the E.U.
(i am greek so here we (should) do whatever the bosses in the EU decide),
but in any way i think a legal formula could be found around this.
Any european lawyers here?
