Checking if your car is parked in your garage or if it's on the road is rather easy to do, and the advantages are pretty big:
I have had mine there for over a year, and I am still using my original set of batteries, but it isn't hard to hardwire the motion sensor to the car's battery by tapping into one of the accessories wires. If you are really courageous, you could do the dusk/dawn -> contact sensor hack, allowing you to monitor if your car is running or doors are locked.
The logic behind this is pretty simple, I am using the Homeseer Doomotion plugin to do this, but it really isn't that difficult. All you have to do is create a virtual device i.e. "v5", and name it "my car". This is the logic behind it, you can create a few events to do all of this.
- You can have your Home Automation system announce "Honey I'm home" when you pull up (my wife likes this one, since she can't hear the garage door, and she absolutely hates it when I sneak up
).
- Monitor if your kids arrived home safely/in time.
- Automatically secure the house when all cars are on the road.
- Turn on the power to your garage door opener automatically if you get close to your garage (some people like to use an appliance module to control the power of the garage door opener, acting as a backup security mechanism).
- Have your outside lights turn on when arriving home at night.
- The house can automatically greet you and get ready to provide you with the latest voice mail messages, weather etc.
I have had mine there for over a year, and I am still using my original set of batteries, but it isn't hard to hardwire the motion sensor to the car's battery by tapping into one of the accessories wires. If you are really courageous, you could do the dusk/dawn -> contact sensor hack, allowing you to monitor if your car is running or doors are locked.
The logic behind this is pretty simple, I am using the Homeseer Doomotion plugin to do this, but it really isn't that difficult. All you have to do is create a virtual device i.e. "v5", and name it "my car". This is the logic behind it, you can create a few events to do all of this.
- When the car's motion sensor has been OFF for a few minutes, and the status changed to ON, then update v5's devicestring to "on the road".
- When the motion sensor has been ON for a few minutes, and the motion sensor now reports OFF, then update v5's devicestring to "parked in the garage". Since the OFF only arrives 60 seconds after you have arrived, it might be too slow (I am usually upstairs within 60 seconds), but this is just a backup, the next condition is the one that will provide real time notification.
- When the motion sensor has been ON for a few minutes, and the motion sensor reports ON, then update v5's devicestring to "parked in garage". The logic here is that the motion sensor will keep transmitting ON's while there is movement, so if there hasn't been any motion for a while, then it's safe to say that you are arriving home. This allows you to almost instantly notify the house you are pulling up on your driveway (assuming you motion sensor has a good range). Since you usually move your foot from the accelerator to the brakes, you are almost guaranteed to trigger the motion sensor.