Hills R8 Reading Zone Sensors into RaspberryPi

**medoix** · 01-01-15, 08:04 PM

Hi all,

Just stumbled across this forum and read a few posts that had some very smart people giving advice so thought i would ask away.

Basically i have just built a house and it has come with the Hills R8 system and it looks like multiple zones are connected together to share DATA ports on the panel (as per the picture) and in another post i read this was managed by different resistance levels for each zone and therefore the panel could tell the zone that tripped... (if i understood that correctly).

What i want to do is connect up each of these DATA ports to a GPIO pin on a Raspberry Pi and read the status of each zone/sensor etc so i can basically hook into these sensors for home automation tasks. Looking at the way each sensor connects both wires to a single point i thought i could just connect up a single wire to say Port 1 and read the high/low status to see if for instance the front door was open/closed but this does not seem to be the case and i was looking for some advise on what i may be missing in order to read these correctly?

Thanks for any help.

Pictures of unit are attached.

**AdRock** · 01-01-15, 08:20 PM

So what your saying is you want to be able to read the resistor values for each zone?

If that's the case you will need to take each cable out of the terminal )zone and common) and measure across the blue and white. For example zones 1 (front door) and 5 (living room windows) are both wired parallel into zone 1 of the panel. Your front doors when closed should read 3.3K ohms and the family windows 6.8 ohms.
If you looking to do home automation this isn't the panel for you. You would need something a lot more modern.

**medoix** · 02-01-15, 07:22 PM

Thank you AdRock. It does make a lot more sense now when i am looking at it. I have other systems doing the home automation side of things i just want to be able to read when one of these sensors is triggered. Unfortunately i am not that good at electronics so trying to figure out the best way. Do you think its possibly to put a board in the middle of these wires to read each proper zone but still pass the correct resistance through to the R8 panel?

**phantomdb** · 03-01-15, 08:50 AM

id say make sure you are using a minimum of two wires On on the Zone wire and One on the common wire for the reference point, so in zone 1 lets say bung a multimeter and start tripping zones and mesure the voltage at the terminal for that zone. now if it has two wires in zone one its also has a high zone so proceed to trip that zone and measure the voltage this iis now your reference for a high zone. and just for giggles take a voltage reference for no zone open and for both zones open. so that would be four states to monitor.

now you just need to script a gpio on the pi to reference the four states and process the commands.

after that add a relay to the ball output and design a webpage for the pi and have some user interface thet IF relay for bell is on send e-mail for zone one-two- etc.... and make some form of basic reporting interface. this also has a greater application in reality as it is able to be modified to suit other panels.

Id be interested to hear how your project goes.
Best of luck

**bet2win** · 03-01-15, 10:24 AM

Why bother with the RaspberryPI, when you can just put a ComNav in and it will do what you want.

**Drift** · 03-01-15, 11:21 AM

RPi is more likely to function reliably.

**caffiend** · 04-01-15, 12:53 AM

Originally Posted by medoix

Do you think its possibly to put a board in the middle of these wires to read each proper zone but still pass the correct resistance through to the R8 panel?

In answer to you're question... Unfortunately no (well not easily). The way the resistance level is measured by most commercial alarm systems is comparing the current flow of each input against that of a reference resistor employing . Any component in between has the potential to change the circuit such that the measured resistance value will change, resulting in a tamper alarm.

Without wanting to incur the wrath of Downunder Dan... If you're wanting an alarm system which is fun to tinker with and can do just about anything you ask of it, perhaps a Tecom or Concept system would be more to you're liking. Don't get me wrong, they're not you're average home alarm system. They're fairly expensive, extremely complicated, and are generally only used for high-end commercial installations, but they are both highly configurable, and can give you serial data for input state changes, which you can easily interpret with your RPI without compromising the functionality of you're alarm system.

I'm not recommending this as a good security solution for you're house (it's certainly overkill), but if you're someone who's looking to build they're own home-automation system, why not go for the big-guns. These are the same systems that professionals use to secure sky-scrapers and critical infrastructure, and they're not that expensive. Maybe make friends with you're local alarm installer, buy a case of beer... and Happy Hacking

**triton** · 04-01-15, 11:17 AM

You require an additional module for the Relliance R8 that will connect to the keypad buss and convert the data to RS232 serial output. The module you are after is the NX 584 home automation module. To obtain the required Protocol Document you will have to sign an NDA from the manufacturer before they will hand this out. The module itself is fairly inexpensive but allows you to Recieve all status messages from the alarm panel as well as send control commands to it like arming and disarming.
Call DAS to get more info on this as they are the supplier of the product in Australia.