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Motion Sensor as Security


Greentree38

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Hi Guys,

 

I'm wondering if anybody has used a motion sensor as a security mechanism out side of show times before? My thought would be to place one directly across the gate to the front yard so if anybody entered after show hours the lights would flick on (I'd just make a strobe show for say 5 minutes.)

 

Soooo;

I've got a 2 series 2 controllers and new series 3 controller, would I need to purchase anything other then wiring and a motion sensor to make this happen?

 

How would I program the schedule to use the motion sensor only outside of regular show times?

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  • 1 year later...

I run a static show after my normal show for security. I cant help you with triggers

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

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I do use interactive triggers every day of the year, so I can help you out. Will type more when I'm not on my phone.


Sent from my Droid Turbo via Tapatalk, so blame any typos or spelling errors on Android

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Now that I'm on a real keyboard and not my phone, here is a longer answer.  First the hardware side of it.

As part of my year round landscape lighting, I have RGB dumb strips on the underside of the overhanging brick on the steps to my front porch.  You can't see it in this photo, but it's there.

Steps_front.jpg

On either side of the steps is one end of an IR light beam - located inside the 2 x 4 electrical boxes that have a hole in the cover plate.  There is a piece of lexan that is epoxied to the inside of the cover to waterproof the box and still allow the IR bean to get through. The other ends of the two IR light beam is behind the camera in the above photo.  I intentionally have the transmit and receive end opposite each other to reduce the possibility of one transmitter being seen by both receivers.  What I mean by that is that the box you can see in the upper left of the photo has a transmitter that is sending to a receiver that is directly behind the camera in a planter about 12 feet from the transmitter.  The small box at the right end of the steps is a receiver that is looking for an IR signal from a transmitter about six feet to the right of the camera and about 10 feet from the receiver.  In the case of the transmitter to the left of the steps, the power for the transmitter is run under the overhand of the top step along with the RGB dumb strip.  The receiver has 1/2 inch conduit into the 8 x 8 x 4 electrical box in the far right side of the photo.  That has both the power and alarm contact closure.  Not shown in this photo, there is also a fairly standard magnetic door switch on the screen door.  The contact closure for that routes via a rather long conduit route through the attic that ultimately gets to the InputPup in the front yard.  Although it's a bit hard to see in the photo, there are three conduits coming out of the bottom of the 8 x 8 box.  The middle one is a 1/2 inch conduit that goes to the transmitter and receiver boxes in the planter to provided both power and alarm contact closure.  One of the other pieces of conduit goes to one of the brick columns in the front yard where a LOR InputPup is located - originally was a ServoDog as shown in the photo (but the function is the same):

DC_column_left.jpg

The three inputs described above all have inputs on the InputPup (along with a few other things).  Now for the software side of it.

I will describe this in terms assuming using the Show Editor.  My evening landscape lighting show has a startup sequence that ramps up the various lights in the yard that will be used for the landscape lighting.  That includes the RGB strips under the porch steps.  The "idle" setting for the steps is: Red - 8%, Green - 4%, and Blue 1%.  This results in a very dim white.  After the startup sequence is completed, the two landscape sequences run in the musical tab.  This is important - the porch steps are NOT in either of the landscape sequences.  In the Interactive tab, there is an interactive group that I called steps.  This is a "Jukebox" type interactive group.  Within the interactive group, there are three triggers - one each for the two IR beams, and one for the front door.  Each of these triggers will trigger an animation sequence that ramps up the strips on the steps for 45 seconds and then ramps them back down to the idle state.  Each trigger calls a different sequence, although two are identical except for the name and the event logging that they do. In the case of the front door trigger, the sequence ramps up the steps lights from top to bottom over 1.5 seconds, and in the case of the walkway and driveway sequences, the steps ramp up from the bottom to top over 1.5 seconds.  When the lights are turned off in the morning, the shutdown sequence does include the steps and they are turned off along with everything else.

 

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