Relays DVR and LED Lights

Relays, DVRs and LED Lights

Once you have a quality alarm control panel installed, such as the Honeywell Ademco Vista-20P; there are a lot of creative things you can do with your system. The Vista-20P allows for up to sixteen programmable outputs with the addition of four Ademco 4204 relay boards. Each relay board supplies four programmable relays. I used the relays for lighting the low voltage LED lights that I had installed around the house. The trigger for the relays were the outdoor motion sensors, and the motion sensor built into the DVR for the outdoor security cameras. There are two sets of LED lights on the exterior of the building. One set is on relay one, and the other set is on relay two. Relay one is set to close the circuit for 45 seconds, so the lights stay on for that period of time. Relay two is set to close for 60 seconds, so those lights stay on a little longer.

sensors since the infra-red light attract so many bugs. Therefore, the cameras are often registering the bugs as motion when there really isn’t any. The DVR has one channel alarm output and 4 channels for alarm inputs. I used the alarm output to tie into the alarm panel as a perimeter zone. When the non-IR cameras sense motion, they alert the control panel. The control panel, in turn, alerts the DVR when the outdoor motion sensors are activated. The relay accomplishes this by closing a normally open contact. The DVR is programmed to send an email message with three photos of each camera attached to it when it receives the alarm signal from the relay.