ELK to IR

I have something which can only be controlled by IR. I'd like to be able to control it with my ELK. Has anyone figured out how to trigger IR from an ELK? I only need a few commands. Worst case I could hack a learning remote and trigger it with relay outputs.

I'm planning to get an iTach for IP to IR for other purposes. Is there a way for the M1XEP to communicate IR codes via IP to an iTach.

Or could the the M1XSP communicate to some kind of RS232 to IR generator?

There are various ways of doing this, all depending on your infrastructure. If you use INSTEON or UPB, they each have a module which allow you to control IR equipment. If you have an Ocelot, you can hook it up to a spare XSP (this is the route I went several years ago), and use ASCII commands to control the IR commands.

If you want to communicate via IP, I think you will need ELK's Serial Ethernet bridge.

I have an ISY with the network module and an itach as well as an m1g. The ISY/itach sends IR commands beautifully. But I doubt you want to buy an ISY for this one feature. I don't know of any way to have an Elk send IP commands aside from the central station monitoring ones in m1xep setup which I don't think could be made to work with itach. A learning remote with prgrammable "macros" might be your most cost effective solution. Depending on the remote you might be able to trigger a macro using just a single button press which, as you mentioned, could be hacked to work direct off a relay.

Dan (electron) said:

There are various ways of doing this, all depending on your infrastructure. If you use INSTEON or UPB, they each have a module which allow you to control IR equipment. If you have an Ocelot, you can hook it up to a spare XSP (this is the route I went several years ago), and use ASCII commands to control the IR commands.

If you want to communicate via IP, I think you will need ELK's Serial Ethernet bridge.

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Speaking from personal experience, I would not get the Insteon IR transmitter. I tried it and found the signal to be so weak that it was useless and returned it. This is when I tried the itach with great success.

I don't know if x10 has any IR transmitting options.

As mentioned, the m1xsp allows a serial connection to a pc or other dedicated piece of hardware. If you really know your stuff, you could program your own application on a pc which would then output IP commands to the itach. Probably some of the HA software packages have that built in, but like buying an ISY, you may not want to spend that much cash for this one purpose.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm thinking the only way to get output from the M1G is to use either lighting commands or relay outputs. Lighting commands are sent to the serial output. I could connect that to an interface that can read RS232, interpret my intent and transmit via IP to the iTach. The question is, what is the best interface?

How does your ISY take commands from the ELK? Via RS232?

I'm also wondering if a GC-100 would work.

RichardU said:

Thanks for the feedback. I'm thinking the only way to get output from the M1G is to use either lighting commands or relay outputs. Lighting commands are sent to the serial output. I could connect that to an interface that can read RS232, interpret my intent and transmit via IP to the iTach. The question is, what is the best interface?

How does your ISY take commands from the ELK? Via RS232?

I'm also wondering if a GC-100 would work.

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One of these should work:

http://www.globalcache.com/products/gc-100/models1/

The ISY is somewhat unique in its integration with the m1g. It does not use the serial unit (xsp) but rather the ethernet unit (xep). The xep just plugs into your home network as does the ISY. Then it is a smiple matter of putting the ip and port number of the elk into the isy. The ISY in reality could be anywhere in the world with proper port forwarding, but I don't recommend having outside of your firewall.

ISY is slated to be fully married to the elk sometime in the next few months. At present you need to do some workarounds to get the isy to respond to elk conditions like zone status or send commands to elk like relay closure or arming. ISY also at present only works with Insteon but is slated to work with UPB as well in the near future.

A global cache will work exactly the same as an itach as far as IR transmission is concerned. The itach has the IR learner built in whereas you would need to buy a separate learner to get the gc100 to learn (which you pretty much have to have because finding the codes on the internet is not very doable from my experience). The GC100 adds several relays which may prove to be useless since the Elk has the ability to add many more relays at a lower cost. The only caveat to that is that the GC relays are controlled via IP commands so anything capable of sending an IP command can be used to control them. On the flip side, it would be challenging to get elk to control a GC relay (the same problem as getting it to send IR commands).

If you don't already have a good HA software package and have Insteon or UPB, I would highly recommend the ISY to serve as the heart of your HA. If you have UPB, however, I would wait until they actually bring the UPB firmware out, ust to make sure it actually happens.

Lou Apo said:

Then it is a smiple matter of putting the ip and port number of the elk into the isy. ...get the isy to respond to elk conditions like zone status or send commands to elk like relay closure or arming.

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So am I to understand that the ELK does not actively trigger the ISY, instead, the ISY senses changes in ELK status, and then triggers itself?

Lou Apo said:

ISY also at present only works with Insteon but is slated to work with UPB as well in the near future.

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I'm using Jetstream for lighting which can be triggered with IR.

Lou Apo said:

A global cache will work exactly the same as an itach as far as IR transmission is concerned.

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I was actually thinking of using the GC100 for its RS232 port, which is not present on the iTach. I was thinking that I could connect the ELK to that RS232 to trigger IR. Maybe it doesn't work that way.

Lou Apo said:

If you don't already have a good HA software package and have Insteon or UPB, I would highly recommend the ISY to serve as the heart of your HA.

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Thanks for the recommendation. I'll take a closer look. I've played with CQC and Homeseer, but they seem like a bit of overkill for my needs.

signal15 said:

One of these should work:

http://www.globalcache.com/products/gc-100/models1/

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Thanks for the input. Do you know how it would connect?

1) Elk at present only communicates with ISY via sending commands that ISY matches to an Insteon device. Elk also is aware of the status of any Insteon device. So, if you wanted for example, zone 2 open to have ISY send an IR command you would write a rule that says, whenever zone 2 becomes not secure, turn light xyz on. Then in ISY you write a program that says, if light xyz turns on, then send IR command abc. Light xyz does not actually have to be a light, it can just be an unused button on a 6 or 8 button kpl. Having said all of that, this is soon to change. It is my understanding that ISY will have full knowledge of Elk status' as well as direct control of Elk outputs.

2) I know notta about jetstream

3) I don't think you can connect the GC directly to the Elk via its xsp. This would require a driver in Elk and I don't think they support the GC 100. Check with Elk on that to be sure. To the best of my knowledge you would need to use a computer as an intermediary with both Elk and GC100 connected to serial ports on the computer. But it would probably be easier to use the ethernet in that situation. The problem here is writing the software to do all of this or buying something that has it already built in. Maybe someone with homeseer or one of the others could tell us if that sort of thing is built in.

Lou, thanks for all your help.

Technically, you could control the GC from the ELK. If the GC won't take serial input directly from the ELK, you can use socat on a linux machine to spawn a pipe between a serial input and a TCP socket which connects to the GC. Yes, it requires a computer in there somewhere, but it would work.

Socat is awesome.