miamicanes
Active Member
I'm getting ready to order my alarm on Monday (hopefully getting it by Friday or the following Monday). So far, the Elk M1EZ8 looks like the clear and obvious choice, mainly because it supports:
* input events via open standards like RS-232 and RS-485. I've built more than a few hardware projects using Atmel microcontrollers (including, among other things, a set of networked RGB Christmas lights where every fully-addressable light consisted of an RGB LED and its own Atmel Tiny25 microcontroller), so the ability to make my own input and output devices and interact with them directly via the controller has major appeal to me.
* WHEN/AND/THEN/OTHERWISE logic in response to events. So I can hold the glassbreak/vibrate sensors at arm's length and use them to notify me when they're allegedly triggered, but hold off on actually triggering the alarm & notifying the alarm monitoring company until either the door gets opened or the motion sensor just beyond it gets driggered.
* respond to events by outputting datagrams via RS-232 and RS-485. Going back to the glassbreak example, I could conceivably respond to a glassbreak event by snapping a few photos with an IP camera, uploading them to a web server somewhere, sending my WM6 phone (Sprint Touch) a SMS message that launches my 'viewer' app, alerts me to the glassbreak, and shows me a picture of the alleged aftermath so I can decide whether to ignore it or go into realtime video-streaming mode so I can remotely lower the hurricane shutters while watching the video to make sure my kitties aren't directly below the lowering hurricane shutters. Or plays an announcement bitching at the person standing in the front doorway if it detects both the front door and screen door (~4 feet away) open at the same time... and gets more forceful if another sensor detects the flashing infrared LED hanging from my kitty's neck and knows he's nearby and might walk out through both open doors...
and, as far as I can tell, either X-10 capability out of the box, or at least as a cheap/straightforward upgrade option (still trying to figure that one out).
So... are there any other systems I might be interested in that I'm overlooking, or is the M1EZ8 really the obvious hole-in-one that it appears to be so far?
* input events via open standards like RS-232 and RS-485. I've built more than a few hardware projects using Atmel microcontrollers (including, among other things, a set of networked RGB Christmas lights where every fully-addressable light consisted of an RGB LED and its own Atmel Tiny25 microcontroller), so the ability to make my own input and output devices and interact with them directly via the controller has major appeal to me.
* WHEN/AND/THEN/OTHERWISE logic in response to events. So I can hold the glassbreak/vibrate sensors at arm's length and use them to notify me when they're allegedly triggered, but hold off on actually triggering the alarm & notifying the alarm monitoring company until either the door gets opened or the motion sensor just beyond it gets driggered.
* respond to events by outputting datagrams via RS-232 and RS-485. Going back to the glassbreak example, I could conceivably respond to a glassbreak event by snapping a few photos with an IP camera, uploading them to a web server somewhere, sending my WM6 phone (Sprint Touch) a SMS message that launches my 'viewer' app, alerts me to the glassbreak, and shows me a picture of the alleged aftermath so I can decide whether to ignore it or go into realtime video-streaming mode so I can remotely lower the hurricane shutters while watching the video to make sure my kitties aren't directly below the lowering hurricane shutters. Or plays an announcement bitching at the person standing in the front doorway if it detects both the front door and screen door (~4 feet away) open at the same time... and gets more forceful if another sensor detects the flashing infrared LED hanging from my kitty's neck and knows he's nearby and might walk out through both open doors...
and, as far as I can tell, either X-10 capability out of the box, or at least as a cheap/straightforward upgrade option (still trying to figure that one out).
So... are there any other systems I might be interested in that I'm overlooking, or is the M1EZ8 really the obvious hole-in-one that it appears to be so far?
