How to set house occupancy via digital inputs?

[Nad]

Hi all,

I've got my alarm feeding an "System Armed" status to one of the digital inputs, but how do i use this to tell Cortex that the house is now unoccupied? We always set the alarm so this is a good way of setting the house occupancy but I haven't been able to figue it out yet.

So in a nutshell, alarm on (digital input state set to 1) - house unoccupied, alarm off (digital input state set to 0) - someone is at home

Thanks in advance.

Nad

[Gumby]

I don't think I understand what you are doing.

Cortex house occupancy is the sum of all room occupancies. Cortex is maintaining occupancy through it's own sensors and tracking logic, so directly manipulating it would seem to interfere with that.

Is it that you have no suitable sensors directly connected to Cortex (ie PIRs, door switches etc)?

[chris_j_hunter]

wonder if the System Armed signal, the digital input into Cortex, might be best used to trigger an everything (that should be) off response - perhaps with a time-delay, in-case people forgot something & came back-in ... ? For that it might be good, because there'd be fair certainty the house was going to be empty for a while ...

[Nad]

Ooops ... I think i should have been clearer in my earlier post Basically I want to set the presanse simulation on when we are not at home and the alarm is the perfect way of telling Cortex that there it's OK to run the simulation.

At the moment I only have a couple of PIRs and no door switches (I have more to connect up but haven't had time) so I wanted to be able to manually set a state of "unoccupiedness".

I played about with the settings a bit more last night and have managed to set one of the inputs as a digital input and then set that as the light level trigger for presanse simulation. It's a bit of a messy solution but seems to be doing the trick for now. I'll have to go back to the drawing board when I insall the external light sensor though.

As per Chris's surgestion, I did think about using the Cortex security function and use my alarm armed input to arm the security function in Cortex, but haven't had a chance to play with that yet.

Thinking a bit more about it, I don't think I would have to worry about people forgetting stuff and coming back in becuase they'd need to disarm the alarm before they can leave the hallway. The armed input is only active when the alarm is fully armed.

Thanks for the quick replies guys