When To Say "Hello" aka: How to tell if you are entering the home

[Ed Nelson]

Hello all;
It has been awhile since I last chatted yet over the last 12 months I have completed my Elk/M1, Nuvo, Insteon, Pronto based install.
Lights are adjusted based on sunrise/sunset. Verbal statuses are provided throughout the day on both door/window states
as well as temperature and time reminders. Complex actions are taken that factor in time of day and motion. The home even
monitors specific motion patterns that occur in the house and will snap a picture of the source and send a page to my cell and
upload the images to my email account.

Thanks again to all who have helped in this endeavor...

My question is kind of a rubix cube:
I would like to establish a rule that is triggered when someone "enters" the home, not just when the front door is opened.
I would envision something along the lines:
1. If event triggered on outside of door
2. If front door open
3. If after sunset
- then activate lighting scene-1
- Announce: "welcome home"
- Announce: Current temperature indoors is
- Announce: All Zones are secure or (list of zones by name (master bath window..etc.) not secure

I'm comfortable with meeting the programing goals via the Elk/M1, but I have not found a reliable external trigger that won't accidentally
trip when leaving. Heaven would be some sort of prox. reader that would allow specific logic based on RFID Tag connected to keychain,
but I currently have no wire running to the entry area to support a connection. If there is a reliable wireless solution that would work with
the Elk/M1, that would be fantastic.

Thanks again all.

- Ed

 

[paulw11]

Hi,

Perhaps you could use a pair of rules to detect direction of travel.

Assuming that you have a reed on the front door you should be able to detect whether the outside sensor tripped before the door opened or after. If before then you can assume someone is arriving, if after then someone is leaving.

You could use rules something like:

When outside_zone becomes not secure
Set counter=2

Whenever front_door becomes not secure
and counter is not 0
and it is dark
then activate lights
then speak "welcome home"
...

Whenever every minute
and counter is not 0
the decrement counter

This set of rules would trigger if the front door was opened within 2 minutes of the outside sensor triggering. You can increase this or decrease it (to a minimum of 1 minute) by changing the counter initialization value.

You might also want to give some thought to how many times this rule would execute in a given evening, perhaps by using another counter that resets in the morning, otherwise you might just go outside for a minute on some sort of errand only to be greeted by the full "welcome home" speech when you come back in.

Paul

 

[Ed Nelson]

Very clean logic. I apologize if my question was not clearer. What I am seeking is a device that I can place on the outside of the home that would be the trigger mechanism. Hopefully something wireless that can intergrate with the ELk/M1.

- Ed

 

[paulw11]

Hi Ed,

Sorry, I missed that point.

You could use an outdoor motion sensor along with the Elk M1XRF2G receiver.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the motion sensor is a SAW based unit, not crystal. The M1XRF2G page says that it only works with the crystal based transmitters. You could try anyway or you could use the older NX548E interface or depending on how sheltered your entrance area is use a crystal-based indoor motion sensor.

Regards,
Paul

 

[gacevich]

The home even monitors specific motion patterns that occur in the house and will snap a picture of the source and send a page to my cell and upload the images to my email account.

Ed, can u elaborate on this a bit...hardware, software, rules? this is functionality that i would like to add and haven't yet ironed out all the details. My goal is an email to my blackberry that includes the image. thanks.

 

[Xpendable]

You can use a pressure sensing mat just inside your front door. These are high-quality mats like the ones they use in haunted houses to activate halloween props when you step on them. They are probably available in different sizes. These are usually fairly thin, and some can even be mounted underneath carpeting, plywood, etc. They are pretty reliable. I know a guy who uses them for his Halloween haunt to trigger pneumatic props. Anyway, you would write a rule that gives your greeting only if the front door is opened first without the mat being triggered, which would seem to indicate somebody entering the house. If someone rang the door bell and you opened the door, you wouldn't have the greeting because presumably you would have stepped on the mat before opening the door.

Some examples of pressure mats:

http://www.rfmicrolink.com/pressure_mat.html
http://www.frightprops.com/FrightProps/Props/Sensors/Mat.asp
http://www.smarthome.com/790901.html

 

[thewireguy]

If you have a Keypad next to your outside doors your could add the external RIFD reader to the keypad on the outside and use that to trigger the events. Should be easy depending on where the keypads are located.

 

[ver0776]

The motion detectors in combonation with the door sensor works, but do you have a screen door? The order the two doors open works also and is my primary rule, but the rule is backed up by the motion detectors incase the front door is left open, then the screen door will reference motion detectors.

Vaughn

 

[Ed Nelson]

You know... this board is so great at providing exactly what I need, that one day I am gonna
ask "... how can I get an Enzo Ferrari for free..." and I am sure someone would have an answer.

That said. Thanks to all and particularly Xpendable. Looks like you have my answer.

I hope my input on this and the "Charmed" board begin to repay the help.


- Ed

 

[jrs0628]

I don't know if this is even applicable, but I had the same problem a few weeks back and I thought I would add in my solution. I decided to use my bluetooth enabled cellphone and ping it every 15 seconds. The range on my bluetooth adapter actually reaches a good 15 foot outside my front door. Once my houses notices that I left (normally 15 minutes after no motion has been detected in the house, my cell phone is no where to be found, and the front door closed last) it sets me away. Then, when I return, my controller senses my bluetooth phone and connects to it before I can even get to the front door. I have a wireless deadbolt that has a remote hooked up to a relay over my porch, so before I can even get to the front door the house unlocks the door. Once I open the front door, it knows I am home. It does a bunch of other stuff like detecting when I'm on/off the phone in the house so that it can mute the music/voice/sounds/etc for me. My Motorola V3 Razor is something that I carry with me all the time... so I thought it was a better solution than carrying a RFID card/device.

 

[AceCannon]

I don't know if this is even applicable, but I had the same problem a few weeks back and I thought I would add in my solution. I decided to use my bluetooth enabled cellphone and ping it every 15 seconds. The range on my bluetooth adapter actually reaches a good 15 foot outside my front door. Once my houses notices that I left (normally 15 minutes after no motion has been detected in the house, my cell phone is no where to be found, and the front door closed last) it sets me away. Then, when I return, my controller senses my bluetooth phone and connects to it before I can even get to the front door. I have a wireless deadbolt that has a remote hooked up to a relay over my porch, so before I can even get to the front door the house unlocks the door. Once I open the front door, it knows I am home. It does a bunch of other stuff like detecting when I'm on/off the phone in the house so that it can mute the music/voice/sounds/etc for me. My Motorola V3 Razor is something that I carry with me all the time... so I thought it was a better solution than carrying a RFID card/device.

What are you using to ping the phone? Can you expand on this setup a little?

 

[jrs0628]

I don't know if this is even applicable, but I had the same problem a few weeks back and I thought I would add in my solution. I decided to use my bluetooth enabled cellphone and ping it every 15 seconds. The range on my bluetooth adapter actually reaches a good 15 foot outside my front door. Once my houses notices that I left (normally 15 minutes after no motion has been detected in the house, my cell phone is no where to be found, and the front door closed last) it sets me away. Then, when I return, my controller senses my bluetooth phone and connects to it before I can even get to the front door. I have a wireless deadbolt that has a remote hooked up to a relay over my porch, so before I can even get to the front door the house unlocks the door. Once I open the front door, it knows I am home. It does a bunch of other stuff like detecting when I'm on/off the phone in the house so that it can mute the music/voice/sounds/etc for me. My Motorola V3 Razor is something that I carry with me all the time... so I thought it was a better solution than carrying a RFID card/device.

What are you using to ping the phone? Can you expand on this setup a little?

Well, I use MisterHouse on a linux box to control my house (It's written in Perl). Using the BlueZ utilities (standard bluetooth driver for linux), on bootup my computer makes a virtual "serial port" between my phone and the computer with the bluetooth MAC address. The serial port is created even if the phone is not on or anywhere to be found. I then wrote a standalone perl script that runs in the background of one of my PCs that constantly trys to connect to the virtual serial port every 15 seconds. If it is able to connect, then it pairs with the device using my preset code automatically and then it issues the AT (modem) commands to setup the phone connection to the house. I use xAP commands to broadcast that the phone just connected/disconnected to MisterHouse, as well as other states such as when someone is calling (to announce the caller ID so I don't have to run and find my phone), when I pickup (mutes the house speakers and pauses my iTunes player on my windows PC), when I hangup (resumes the music if it was playing before and unmutes the speakers). Since I'm using the xAP protocol, I can have the bluetooth adapter on a different computer closer to the door and it just broadcasts the messages across the network for MisterHouse to see.