kwilcox
Active Member
So I had a chance to stay at the new Palazzo suites in Las Vegas recently and had marvel at their super-sensitive occupancy sensors in every room. I could literally twitch my finger and the detector would see it. It just reminded me of how dismal the Hawkeye sensors that form the backbone to my own home's sophisticated lighting control are compared to professional solutions.
My house makes its own decisions about lighting levels based on many things. To improve the accuracy of these decisions, I need more sensitive motion input to my lighting macros than what hawkeye detectors can provide. Increased sensitivity allows me to lower light-out times and eliminate the occasional motion "miss" that hawkeyes are notorious for, ensuring 100% light-on response when someone enters a darkened room. Plus, having unobtrusive ceiling mounted sensors looks much more professional than Hawkeyes with their big "X10 Pro" logos...
My search led me to test many PIR and multi-sensor motion detectors. I finally settled on the Honeywell 997. Like most security oriented detectors, this one features a normally closed relay which opens when motion is detected. Sweet. Just dial up one of the many Hawkeye mods that turn this device into a contact-close sensor and Voila!
Too bad it didn't work. The sensor mods out there replace the Day/Night CDS with a switch/load resistor. Unfortunately, the Hawkeye isn't programmed to instantly react to a change here. In fact, it took about 4 seconds. Way too slow. So, I decided to engineer my own mod targeted at the PIR input to the PIC.
When finished with this little mod, a Hawkeye will instantly react when the connection breaks and will send an X10 on about every 5 seconds until the connection is closed again. This makes it a perfect wireless transmitter for just about any "fail safe" security device you can think of.
Here's how to do it:
Start by removing a 1meg resistor, the CDS cell and the green LED. Here's the locations:
Next, solder a 1K quarter watt pullup resistor between +3 and the anode location of the now removed green LED. This is the PIC's GP0 input and needs to be high to cause code transmission. Here's a pic showing this:
Finally, connect a 2 conductor wire between ground and the GP0 input. Just solder it to the resistor on one side and the convenient ground jumper near where the CDS cell was as shown:
Now notch out the side for the wire to exit:
and Bada Bing: a highly sensitive wireless X10 transmitter for the myriads of fail-safe relay based sensors out there. No more 5 second lag between sensor re-arms either. Every time the contact opens, this "pwn3d" Hawkeye will instantly transmit the programmed House/Unit code.
So how am I using it? Think cost-effective contact based input to HCA or any other HA solution that is compatible with a W800RF32. Check out the post containing a full writeup in the Fortress showcase thread for details. That post is located here.
Enjoy the mod!
My house makes its own decisions about lighting levels based on many things. To improve the accuracy of these decisions, I need more sensitive motion input to my lighting macros than what hawkeye detectors can provide. Increased sensitivity allows me to lower light-out times and eliminate the occasional motion "miss" that hawkeyes are notorious for, ensuring 100% light-on response when someone enters a darkened room. Plus, having unobtrusive ceiling mounted sensors looks much more professional than Hawkeyes with their big "X10 Pro" logos...
My search led me to test many PIR and multi-sensor motion detectors. I finally settled on the Honeywell 997. Like most security oriented detectors, this one features a normally closed relay which opens when motion is detected. Sweet. Just dial up one of the many Hawkeye mods that turn this device into a contact-close sensor and Voila!
Too bad it didn't work. The sensor mods out there replace the Day/Night CDS with a switch/load resistor. Unfortunately, the Hawkeye isn't programmed to instantly react to a change here. In fact, it took about 4 seconds. Way too slow. So, I decided to engineer my own mod targeted at the PIR input to the PIC.
When finished with this little mod, a Hawkeye will instantly react when the connection breaks and will send an X10 on about every 5 seconds until the connection is closed again. This makes it a perfect wireless transmitter for just about any "fail safe" security device you can think of.
Here's how to do it:
Start by removing a 1meg resistor, the CDS cell and the green LED. Here's the locations:
Next, solder a 1K quarter watt pullup resistor between +3 and the anode location of the now removed green LED. This is the PIC's GP0 input and needs to be high to cause code transmission. Here's a pic showing this:
Finally, connect a 2 conductor wire between ground and the GP0 input. Just solder it to the resistor on one side and the convenient ground jumper near where the CDS cell was as shown:
Now notch out the side for the wire to exit:
and Bada Bing: a highly sensitive wireless X10 transmitter for the myriads of fail-safe relay based sensors out there. No more 5 second lag between sensor re-arms either. Every time the contact opens, this "pwn3d" Hawkeye will instantly transmit the programmed House/Unit code.
So how am I using it? Think cost-effective contact based input to HCA or any other HA solution that is compatible with a W800RF32. Check out the post containing a full writeup in the Fortress showcase thread for details. That post is located here.
Enjoy the mod!