I know the manual discusses sea-level stuff, but I know very little about those. I've had a neighbor ask me to help him set up a camera system, and he wants to use sensors to trigger alerts like I do.
My home configuration is a bit complicated, and I don't think it's the most efficient for someone who's just getting started. I have a driveway alert with a receiver in the house. The receiver has a set of relay contacts that toggle when the IR beam on the driveway alert is tripped. I've hooked up a DSC wireless alarm sensor to the contact which toggles an unmonitored/supervised zone on my home alarm. The alarm panel connects to my LAN with a ethernet daughter board. My home automation controller (VERA) reads the status of all the zones on the alarm panel, and when the zone for the driveway alert is toggled, the VERA sends an HTTP command to the BI server to generate an external trigger event to send an alert to my phone. It's not pretty, but it has been 100% reliable, and quick - I usually get notification within 3-4 seconds of the driveway IR beam being broken.
I could avoid much of that by going with a z-wave door sensor in lieu of the DSC alarm items, but since I'm already using may of the 64 zones of the alarm panel to trigger home automation scripts, it was there to be used. The neighbor, however, has neither alarm nor z-wave.
TL;DR
What is the minimum hardware needed to take a relay output signal from a driveway alert, and get it into the PC running BI so it can initiate an external trigger alert?
My home configuration is a bit complicated, and I don't think it's the most efficient for someone who's just getting started. I have a driveway alert with a receiver in the house. The receiver has a set of relay contacts that toggle when the IR beam on the driveway alert is tripped. I've hooked up a DSC wireless alarm sensor to the contact which toggles an unmonitored/supervised zone on my home alarm. The alarm panel connects to my LAN with a ethernet daughter board. My home automation controller (VERA) reads the status of all the zones on the alarm panel, and when the zone for the driveway alert is toggled, the VERA sends an HTTP command to the BI server to generate an external trigger event to send an alert to my phone. It's not pretty, but it has been 100% reliable, and quick - I usually get notification within 3-4 seconds of the driveway IR beam being broken.
I could avoid much of that by going with a z-wave door sensor in lieu of the DSC alarm items, but since I'm already using may of the 64 zones of the alarm panel to trigger home automation scripts, it was there to be used. The neighbor, however, has neither alarm nor z-wave.
TL;DR
What is the minimum hardware needed to take a relay output signal from a driveway alert, and get it into the PC running BI so it can initiate an external trigger alert?