Z-Wave Door and Window Sensor

The door and window sensor senses if a door or window is open or closed. The sensor consists of two small packages. One is a battery powered Z-Wave 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, door and window 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 is programmable. Longer intervals prolong battery life, but make the device less responsive to the network.

Some Door and Window Sensors have 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 product's documentation for more information on wiring to your sensor.

Installing a Door and Window Sensor

The Door and Window Sensor Device has three output status terminals. The "1S" terminal shows if a door/window is open (on), or closed (off). The "alarm" terminal shows the state of a contact switch on the bottom of the radio. The alarm terminal allows one to know if the radio is being tampered with. If someone lifts up the radio, the alarm terminal turns on. After one puts the sensor back down, some sensors will set the alarm terminal to off. Others leave the alarm terminal in the on state, but won't generate anymore "on" events. The "battery" terminal shows the state of the battery. The battery terminal has values of 100 or less. 100 means the battery is at 100% of its capacity.

Create the Door Window Sensor Device by running the SensorDoorWindow Script. The parameters for the SensorDoorWindow Script are:

address :

• the Z-Wave address of the device

wakeup_interval :

• the time, in seconds, between wake ups (typical intervals are many hours long)

port_location :

• this parameter is only necessary when there is more than one Z-Wave network. The port_location is the USB port of the network's Z-Wave controller. It is used to differentiate Z-Wave 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 a Door and Window Sensor Device with ID "door_window", a wakeup interval of 12 hours, and a Z-Wave address of 3 to a system with one Z-Wave network, run the SensorDoorWindow Script with the following parameters:

id: "door_window"
wakeup_interval: 43200    # 60 * 60 * 12
address: 3