Car Impact Sensor / Non-Cloud Alternative to wirelesstag.net

[simonsez]

Hi,

 

I live in an urban area where we have no on property parking. As a result we purchase permits from the city to allow us to park on the street. Sadly, many of the other [insert many expletives here] people around us should probably be purchasing bus passes rather than driving cars. One couple in particular are two of the worst drivers I have ever witnessed and couldn't parallel park to save their life. In addition once in a while we get people breaking into cars, and one time this has resulted in damage to my car with them trying to pry the window open.

 

To combat this, or to at least alert me to an issue I am using an Insteon motion sensor hung from a short string inside the trunk of my car, and another one set up the same way for my girlfriends car. Should the car get bumped for what ever reason the sensor swings / gets distributed and this will trigger it. From there, the Isy triggers my Zonerminder DVR activating my street cam and should catch video of the incident. In addition it notifies myself or my girlfriend depending on who's car is involved. It actually works quite well.

 

The way it works is a KPL at the front door allows you to check your car in/out. When you check it in (KPL button on), the monitoring is active and the ISY will respond to the motion event, and when you check it out the monitoring is inactive.

 

So my question is this, I'd like to get rid of the check in / check out. I've been trying to find some way to detect the presence of the cars. I saw some mentions of wirelesstag.net on here and did some research. It's pretty neat, but I absolutely hate the cloud aspect due to the reasons voiced on that thread about it. I also initially thought I could use the 'is responding' condition for the motion sensors but after some reading on the forum it appears this will not work with RF only devices because they normally are 'sleeping' and can't be queried.

 

Thanks,

Simon

[Mike Ippolito]

The things we use home automation for! Excellent idea!

 

My initial thought is to use the mobilinc app and enable the geofence function.

The question is if:

• a) you carry an iPhone

• if your location and your car's location are typically synonymous.

If you're not always with your car, perhaps an alternative (but expensive) solution is to keep an iPod touch in the car running mobilinc.

 

I'll continue to ponder...

Mike

[simonsez]

The things we use home automation for! Excellent idea!

 

My initial thought is to use the mobilinc app and enable the geofence function.

The question is if:

• a) you carry an iPhone

• if your location and your car's location are typically synonymous.

If you're not always with your car, perhaps an alternative (but expensive) solution is to keep an iPod touch in the car running mobilinc.

 

I'll continue to ponder...

Mike

 

Hey Mike,

 

Glad you like the idea. I thought either people would think it was cool, or totally ghetto considering my motion sensor is literally hanging from a string ... in the trunk of a car.

 

I no longer have an iPhone having switched over to Android devices and leaving all my Apple stuff behind. However, I know Moblinc is available for Android so maybe I should give it a shot. The idea of using an iPod or something similar as proximity sensor is really interesting too. I'll have to search around and see what the cheapest thing you could possibly get to do this.

 

This also gave me another idea, that potentially I could use Tasker on Android to do something similar. If you haven't heard of it, Tasker lets you perform an automated set of tasks based on a set of conditions. I use it now to disable the keypad lock on my phone when it connects to my home Wifi. I am quite positive I could use it to send an on/off command to the Isy using the wifi network detection as the same condition.

 

Cheers!

Simon

[ISYhbsh01]

Yes you can do the same with Tasker & it's even much more customizable and flexible than the iphone's geofencing.

 

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[arw01]

If you had an old droid laying around, I think you could use tasker with the motion sensor in the phone itself. I saw a shake setting in there as a trigger if I recall.

 

There are a lot of threads, depending on what router you use, or wireless access point, that talk about presence monitoring if your phones are connected to your router via the wifi too.

 

Not totally solved this issue yet either, but leaning towards an inverter and a micro module right now, or some other dualband insteon device I could query. I like the micro module because I think I can wire it to send a signal when the car starts or stops too, which could trigger a query timer to see if the car is no longer in range. Also it's very small, and might be possible to pull the guys out of the whole mess, hard wire it, and put it in a new box.

 

Alan