INSTEON Open/Close Sensor

The Open/Close Sensor senses if a door or window is open or closed. The sensor consists of two small packages. One is a battery powered INSTEON radio and contains a magnetic switch. The other is a magnet. By mounting the radio on one surface and the magnet on another, the radio can tell if the two surfaces (a door and a doorway or two parts of a window) are next to each other (closed) or apart (open).

Being battery powered devices, Open/Close Sensors spend most of their time "sleeping". They sleep to conserve their batteries. When a device is sleeping, it will respond to open/close events, but it won't listen to any events on the network. Battery powered devices will occasionally "wake up", so they can give the network an update of their internal state (battery state, as an example) and to receive any messages from the network. The time between wake ups for the open/close sensor is about 24 hours.

The Open/Close Sensor has a set of electrical terminals available. The terminals allow hooking up external on/off type wired sensors. If you have a door or window sensor with wiring terminals, you can wire it to your Open/Close Sensor. The Sensor will monitor both its door/window as well as your wired sensor(s). See your Open/Close Sensor's documentation for more information about wiring.

Open/Close Sensor Device Description

The Open/close Sensor Device has two output status terminals. The "1S" terminal shows if a door/window is open (on), or closed (off). The "heartbeat" terminal shows that the battery is OK. Every 24 hours, if the battery is OK, the Open/Close Sensor Device will update the heartbeat terminal with the current state of the open/close sensor.

Installing an Open/Close Sensor

Create the Open/Close Sensor Device by running the OpenCloseSensor Script. The parameters for the OpenCloseSensor Script are:

address :

• the INSTEON address of the device

port_location :

• this parameter is only necessary when there is more than one INSTEON network. The port_location is the USB port of the network's INSTEON modem. It is used to differentiate INSTEON networks. In *nix systems, this is in the /dev directory with a name like /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/cu.usbserial-00001004. Type "ls -lrt /dev/*" for hints. On Windows systems, the location is COMx where "x" is a number (1,2,3, etc.).

Example

To add an Open/Close Sensor Device with ID "open_close" and INSTEON address "12.56.CD" to a system with one INSTEON network, run the OpenCloseSensor Script with the following parameters:

id: "open_close"
address: "12.56.CD"