HW: How to hookup 40 magnetic contacts and 20 motion sensors?

Hardware Home Automation
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Hi everyone, (first post here, couldn’t find similar post, don’t shoot me ;-)).

I have OpenHab 2.5.9 running on Windows. All working solidly with C-Bus and Philips Hue lighting.

Now to connect my sensors… I have 40 magnetic reed sensors built inside the wooden door and window frames. They all have CAT5 runs back to a central server area - connected to nothing. I also have 20 CAT5 runs to install motion sensors (no idea which type yet).

HW: What hardware would you recommend to hook all of these up to?

SW: What hardware works best with OpenHab for this? (One day, I’d like to build a floorplan view of the house who show status of all of the contacts/sensors and 60 lights. I assume Openhab wouldn’t have a problem showing the status of over 120 things on one screen?)

Thanks for the support on this!
Enda

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I have a similar installation and trust only wired contacts if possible :wink: I use ADAM-6050 with modbus-binding for that, very relyable. If I do not have cables I use z-wave. Maybe homematic will work too, not tested.

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Great. Never seen these before. I’d need five of these and 5 power supplies to cover my 60 devices.

Do you know if motion sensors generally work like contacts, i.e. open/close?

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I know only PRI which can control bulb directly, no relais in between. So the answer is no.
But you can use a relais instead of the bulb to get the contact you want. Or PIR with contact exists, never seen but never searched :wink:

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I use a 12V DC big power for ADAM6050 and everything else which is connected to it. ADAM6050 can olso be used ad DI and Counter, very useful for metering other things like water, gas, power meters with contact output or open collector.

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@MDAR might know whether Velbus would work.

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Makes senses to use just one power supply.
I am hoping for one larger panel (like a Elk M1 security panel) to cover so many inputs.

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@Bruce_Osborne
Thanks for the mention Bruce.

Sure, Velbus could work for you.
Each DIN Rail mountable VMB7IN would give you 7 inputs that OH can read.

And Velbus Ceiling PIR devices would give you lots of data to use.

They can all use the CAT cables you have installed, but for anyone reading this, I don’t recommend using CAT style cables for the Velbus BUS cable, because the solid cores get fractured when used with rising cage terminations and the cores aren’t great at carrying the supply voltage for larger networks. (Unless you deploy a star topology, which kind of defeats the point of a BUS system)

Alternatively, you can look at the I2C bus devices and use them as GPio pins from an SBC.

openHAB I2C binding

8 IOs per expansion board and up to 128 expansion boards on a single I2C bus (which must be located very close to the SBC)

1 Like
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For motion I use Z-Wave. Very good, you can place it whereever you want, not where the cables are :wink:

Only minus. If OH is not running, no light on motion :wink: But you can do a lot more stuff if PIR triggers. (more lights, notification, …)

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Any will do so optimize for cost. IIRC (search the forum yourself) there’s a device called Pokeys57E that has ~50 inputs for less than ~100$ so that could be a prime candidate.

Motion sensors, well. Will you want to do motion sensing only ?
I’d spend some thoughts on deploying multi sensors that can also do temp, humidity, luminosity.
I also use Z-Wave multi sensors and "mis"use cables to provide power to them.

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Now that looks like a very interesting option. It’s going t to be tricky having 50 cables running into that little thing, so I’ll have to invent some holder & harness. :slight_smile:

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How about Arduino MEGA (you can buy less expensive clones) with ethernet shield W5500 and communication via MQTT with Openhab? Of course you need to create the Arduino sketch.

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