LED doorbell push button for the M1 GOLD

treo650

Active Member
I purchased one off of Amazon, but the led light will not light up, the push button works however.

Is this because there is not enough power going to the button?

How do I wire this so I can get LED light? anything special, other than 2 wire zone hookup?

And also, do anyone have a WORKING door bell with led light they can recommend make and model?

thanks
 
There was a thread about this a while ago - but it'd take some searching. The gist of it is that the M1 zones were never meant to power a light like what's in a doorbell - and you may risk damaging your panel.


What I've done a couple times is flip the doorbell to the other side of the wall (in my last couple houses the doorbell was in a main area or hallway, but the other side of the wall was a closet or pantry). I flipped the doorbell to the inside of the closet/pantry, removed the strike plates (what the solenoid hits to cause the "Ding" so it couldn't make noise but otherwise operated, and used the Elk doorbell detector to get it into a zone.

Of course if you don't want a lighted button, you can bypass all that and hook it into a zone... but you should do this *without* a lighted button or you do risk damage to the M1.
 
thanks alot, I did recall reading on this forum someone using an led lighted button and it worked..I would like to find the button thats compatible.
 
I hacked my own LED buttons. I could not find an existing button with an LED, they all had a "grain of rice" incandescent bulb.
The zones are current limited by built-in 2.2k resistors in the panel, you normally have that zone shorted by a mag contact, so it would be very difficult to do harm.
The original lighted doorbell has the bulb across the contacts so that when the switch is not pushed, current flows through the bulb. When you push the button, the bulb goes out. Remove the back of the button, replace the rice bulb with an LED, (i used a nice blue), (make sure you know which side of the LED is positive) .
Add a 470 or 680 ohm resistor in series with the LED.
Hook up your zone (+) to the long wire (+, anode) on the LED,
Connect the LED short wire (-, cathode) to the resistor in series.
Connect the free end of the resistor to the ELK (-)

Looks and works great, except......

The Elk does not have any sounds that your other half will appreciate. All she wants is a simple ding-dong. :blush:
 
How about powering the unit via something like a RBSN or 924 relay on the trigger wire, then using the relay to provide the actual state to the zone.
 
How about powering the unit via something like a RBSN or 924 relay on the trigger wire, then using the relay to provide the actual state to the zone.
I was thinking a similar way, use a regular doorbell transformer and am AC relay to trigger the elk input.
 
Possibilities that come to mind.

1) You have the polarity backwards. LED's must be in the correct polarity. You had a 50/50 shot. I put my money on this one.
2) Not enough current. LED's hardly need any current, but each Elk zone is only capable of a few milliamps.

There is no way you could damage the Elk board. The leads from the zones are designed to be able to be shorted. How can you get more shorted than shorted? Each zone has a built in resistor, I figured out what it was once but can't remember for sure. It is something like 2000 ohms. As long as what you put in there does nothing more than produce resistance, you can't go wrong.
 
Hrm - I do remember something about it being a bad idea a while back - but found another post from spanky saying it should be fine with LED... so disregard.

As for getting a sound the wife will like - I wired an Elk124 inline with my keypad speakers specifically for this... I have 8 channels of audio I can program anything into via a computer or any other audio source. I found some good chimes on some of the sites that sell musical doorbells - finally found a good westminister sound. Added bonus - I have holiday chimes, and on halloween I actually rotate through a few custom creepy sounds as the front door is opened, and still have a few left for other things (like telling the wife to get her phone out of her car and call me!, etc).
 
OP
This one from radio shack would work. I used a smaller LED, from the Shack, but I don't see it on their site.
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102850

Since this is listed as having a voltage drop of 5V, I would not add the additional series resistor.
Make it fit in the disassembled button casing, I used a Lowes standard doorbell with a pineapple shaped surround.
You should have about a 5v zone with the LED on and 0v when the button is pushed.

Work2Play
When you use the ELK 124 do you stll have the ELK motherboard audio?
 
I was thinking a similar way, use a regular doorbell transformer and am AC relay to trigger the elk input.

Which is pretty much what the Elk doorbell detector is, isn't it? ^_^

I like this topic, I thought in one of the other many threads on this that we had a list somewhere of what works but I couldn't find it. So hopefully we get a list going. I wouldn't mind replacing mine with an LED version, right now it is just an unlighted button...
 
Of course - they both share the same SP12 speakers behind the keypads.

But you also need to switch them with relays via rules too right? Otherwise you risk blowing your speakers if both the 124 and M1 tried to use the outputs at the same time.
 
Just for fun, I took a 12v led that I had sitting around and put it across an Elk zone. It lit up nice and bright. The Elk red 4.9v on that zone which means it effectively was behaving as a resistor somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 ohms (I didn't do the math).
 
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