ideas for long distance controls

[armand]

Hi. I am brainstorming ways to add some sensors and controls to the property entrance gate area of my mother's house. I am planning on installing some HA there later this summer but have a specific problem with distance.

What I have:
House 2200' away from the gate.
Power at the gate and in a small pumphouse by the gate.
Electric powered gate

What I would like:
2 way audio/intercom
camera(s)
gate open/close control (most important requirement)
motion or other vehicle sensor
possible lighting control

The problem, of course, is the distance. Unless someone knows of a reasonably priced ethernet transmitter/receiver, I was planning on running conduit and cable. Distance limitations apply here too. Fiber optic is an option, but would cost nearly $1000 for cable alone. Is coax an option? If I run cable I will probably run 24v but 120v is an option if I need it for signal amplification or whatever along the way.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Armand

 

[justinm001]

You'll obviously need to run power for everything but I'd also run Cat5E, it's cheap. Then put a cheap ethernet switch and plugin ip cameras and some form of ip intercom. Gate open/close could be done with a standard garage door opener type setup or vehicle sensor. Lighting could be controlled by putting some insteon or other outlet and set it so when gate contact sensor is open lights on type of thing. Insteon has window contact sensors that are wireless and might work well.

If you already have power out there you could use a wifi high gain directional antenna with either wifi devices or use a game adapter connected to a switch and wire everything there.

 

[JonW]

Your distance far exceeds ethernet over CAT5 as well as MOCA over coax. However, you could do RS-485 serial over that distance on twisted pair and video over coax.

What other components exist for any home automation you may have? That may help to drive you into one solution over another. The bottom line though is that multi-strand fiber will give you reliable quality audio, video and data at that distance.

 

[merts]

i have done a similar install at a horse ranch. the distance is the biggest problem. the install that i done was 1500 feet. the intercom was a TnT (Touch and Talk) that works through regular house phone. They sell a Impedance matching transfomer that will change the speaker impedance so that it will go out long distance. When someone pulls up to the gate and pushes the button it will ring the phone in the house to a distinctive ring, you can then pick up any phone in the house and talk to who ever is at the gate and open it with push of phone keypad. They also make a module that i use, it can come in handy with a HA system. It will allow you to forward the gate to your cell phone, in the event the home is armed away and no one is home, when someone pulls up to the gate and pushes the button it will forward out on the house phone line to you cell phone and allow you to talk to them as if you are at home, and open the gate with the phone keypad.

i also pulled a 22/4 for security status, using surface mount door contacts i place them so the controller would let me what status the gate was in. Whether it was open or close.

i also pulled a 16/4 for contact closure to control the gate opener.

the gate openers that i use are GTO. they are battery operated, with a battery charger that is a constant trickle charge so you don't have to worry about the power being out.

for your camera i would use fiber, but it you are not familiar with installing it, i would use cat 5E or even maybe 6 (because the conductor is a larger size than 5E) with some active baluns and grabing your power source for the camera at the gate and just sending video over the cat cable.

i use the Elk M1 as automation system, i used the Elk Arming station at the gate, this way i issued each person a code when they showed up and entered their code the M1 would open the gate, and the same on the exit side of the gate. this way the owner knew when his employees got to work and when they left. works great!!!

i also used a Cartel driveway sensor next to the driveway by the gate, when it picked up a car entering it would control the lights. the lights come on at 50% when it gets dark and when a car enters into the drive it will ramp the lights up to 100% for a certain amount of time. it also was used for voice prompts in the house and barns. Sometime the gates are left open for other workers or service companies to come in. when the sensor picked them up the home and barn would say visitor in driveway a couple of time.

 

[armand]

Jon - thanks for the RS-485 idea. Using fiber would certainly give me more options and may ultimately be cheaper after all. I am leaning toward the copper approach rather than 100% fiber/ethernet because it seems perhaps more reliable and straight-forward. Not looking forward to pulling miles of wire, though.

hytech - thanks for the comprehensive reply. Indeed, your project seems similar to mine. I looked at the TNT and it looks like a good solution. I will probably also go with the Elk for her home. Could I run RS-485 down to an ELK-M1KAM, monitor and control the gate with that? They could continue using the RF remote that came with the gate opener but visitors would use an ELK-M1KPAS arming station. TNT relay signal could go to the ELK M1, the M1KPAS request to exit (RTE), or the gate. Seems like this exceeds the maximum recommended distance for ELK keypads but if it has been done before then I will attempt it - before pulling wire of course. Don't yet have a plan for the motion sensor.

If this seems like a good solution, I would need this much cable:

2200' RG11 - video
2200' 4 pair shielded CAT6 - 2 pairs each for M1KPAS and M1KAM.
2200' 4 pair shielded CAT6 - TNT voice + TNT gate open (relay) signal + motion sensor signal?
2200' UG pair for LV lighting along driveway (switched by M1 and/or M1KAM from one of the alarm outputs)

Please let me know what you think. I am learning as I go.

 

[pete_c]

Just as a "for instance" did a quick Google search for terminated 4 strand multimode fiber and it came to around $2568 for 2K feet. Seeing it a bit cheaper than about 10 years ago (commercial quotes).

 

[armand]

I am starting to think WiFi is a feasible solution. I did some research and found many amplified and/or directional antennas that have a range of many miles and are only $50-$150 per point. Then could I use a pair of RS-232/422/485/Ethernet 802.11 servers to connect to the ELK keypad, etc? Has anybody done this with or without success?

 

[znelbok]

I am in the same boat, my gate is only 120m from the house, but about 150m of cable run (bends etc).

Fibre is the most flexabile, you can get adapters for just about everything for fibre, but not always cheap.

My suggestion based on what I plan to do

Make is self contained i.e. dont have control systems in the house (ie ELK), keep them at the gate and just have a supervisory link to the gate/pumphouse. Use a small controller such as a barix, small pocket PLC or similar - keep the control at the location being controlled.

Use wireless - that is the cheapest solution. Something like a linksys wrt with DDWRT will give good functionality and security - as long as you use a good password.


The issue here is how to get everything onto ethernet.

PLC's/controllers are not to difficult, as are cameras etc, but the intercom will need a bit of research. I cound one here in Aus that had a ethernet adapter and they claimed that I should be able to use two of them back to back to create an ethernet bridge with them (so I could use the standard door phone/cam in the house).

Mick

 

[gatchel]

I am starting to think WiFi is a feasible solution. I did some research and found many amplified and/or directional antennas that have a range of many miles and are only $50-$150 per point. Then could I use a pair of RS-232/422/485/Ethernet 802.11 servers to connect to the ELK keypad, etc? Has anybody done this with or without success?

The elk keypads won't work over wireless..

 

[armand]

Too bad. Does that also apply to the serial and relay expanders. I thought I could bridge the RS485 connection over the wireless using something like these: http://www.bb-elec.com/Subcategory.asp?SubCategoryId=26

 

[pete_c]

I tested a point to point bridge a couple of years ago using two DD-WRT OS set up AP's. Was only maybe around 250 feet from my second floor window to the neighbors' first floor window. Signal was very good. Made little mini parabolic antennas using aluminum foil and cardboard. It worked. You could also make a couple of Yagi's in tubes pretty reasonably. If you connected a serial to ethernet device on each side of the bridge it might work. Very inexpensive to build. For security the options are all there.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

You might want to check out Dakota Alert's MUR's products as they are made for long range contact closure/vehicle detection applications.

For video, just go wireless as there seems to be a lot of solutions to easily handle that distance.

For a keypad/gate control, I would just go with some local hardware (at the pump house?) via a keypad instead of running that logic back to the house.

 

[JayH]

Too bad. Does that also apply to the serial and relay expanders. I thought I could bridge the RS485 connection over the wireless using something like these: http://www.bb-elec.com/Subcategory.asp?SubCategoryId=26

That applies to everything attached to the control bus. There are 2 issues involved here:

1) The bus is RS-485 half-duplex using a 9-bit data packet to handle addressing on the multi-drop line. The BB devices (and almost all others I have seen) don't support the 9-bit data packet. While you can fake it using mark/space to prevent parity errors from showing it doesn't translate correctly on the other end.

2) While I don't remember the baud rate, the bus is polled very quickly and uses an intentional collision of similar devices to indicate that they need to be polled because one of them has data. Once you add in anything buffering packets (the 485-ethernet bridge), combined with the latency introduced by sending it over wireless, the remote device will simply cause bus errors because it will always be late to respond and step on another message.

Jay

 

[gatchel]

Too bad. Does that also apply to the serial and relay expanders. I thought I could bridge the RS485 connection over the wireless using something like these: http://www.bb-elec.com/Subcategory.asp?SubCategoryId=26

That applies to everything attached to the control bus. There are 2 issues involved here:

1) The bus is RS-485 half-duplex using a 9-bit data packet to handle addressing on the multi-drop line. The BB devices (and almost all others I have seen) don't support the 9-bit data packet. While you can fake it using mark/space to prevent parity errors from showing it doesn't translate correctly on the other end.

2) While I don't remember the baud rate, the bus is polled very quickly and uses an intentional collision of similar devices to indicate that they need to be polled because one of them has data. Once you add in anything buffering packets (the 485-ethernet bridge), combined with the latency introduced by sending it over wireless, the remote device will simply cause bus errors because it will always be late to respond and step on another message.

Jay

I think it also has to do with the timing delays associated with wireless to copper and copper to wireless conversion

 

[gatchel]

Cellular for the intercom

http://www.talkaphone.com/product/etp-cicdma

Wireless input and output converter with wiegand interface:

http://www.cypressworld.com