Home Automation - Programming DSC panels

I assume you already read my previous 2 posts on Home Automation which was about what DSC components you need to buy and how to wire the components. Here I will be writing about the next step that is registering the components (door and motion sensors) to the panel.

Note that my setup is all wireless and the assumption is that I am programming using DSC keypad - 5501. If you decided to spend the extra $ and get the 5500, programming components is as easy as triggering the components and registering them. I will speak about it at the end.

All components represent a zone in your panel. All wired zones go into the first 8 zones in the panel. Even if you are not planning to have wired connection, I would suggest that you start registering your components from zone 9 so that later if you decide to wire some new components, you do not need to reprogrammed. There are 3 basic steps that you need to follow for each zone. If your component is wireless, you will also need to enable it and that is an additional step. The basic steps are that the zone needs to be

1. enabled
2. assigned
3. enrolled
4. attribute changed (if component is wireless)

I would recommend that you create a reference table as shown below for all the components you have. If you do not know what to fill for some of the columns, you will soon be clear as you read further and you can come back and fill them up

Description:	Label	Type of Delay:	Zone #	Zone Type	#/ESN #	Enrollment codes
Front Door Sensor	Front door	Delay	09	01	2987F1	*8 5555 804 09 2987*6*1
Main Floor Motion	Main floor motion	Interior Stay/Away	10	05	44E1B0	*8 5555 804 10 44*5*1*2*0

Please note the following as you read ahead

• The assumption is that you have not changed the default installer code. which is "5555".
• If you are using PK5501 keypad, then you will just hear beeps as you type in the keys and not see anything on the screen. Listen to the beeps as you type. For eg, to start programming, you have to type *8 5555. But when you type *8, you will just hear beeps as you type in each number, when you finish typing *8 5555, you will hear multiple beeps. This means it accepted your input and its ready to accept the next value in which case its waiting for the "section number".
• The section number is 3 digit number and you can read about all section numbers in the manual you get with PC1864NK
• ### can be entered anytime to exit programing. This helps while you are programming and you do not know where you are and would like to exit without making any changes that you would not know.
• Be very careful as you type in the keys because if you enter the wrong section and enter something, its very difficult to revert back as you would probably not know what you have changed.

Step 1 - Enable the zone

You need to enable each zone you are registering. To enable the zone what you need to remember is that each section starting from 202 is used to enable only 8 zones.

So section 202 represents zones 1 to 8, 203 represents zones 9 to 16, 204 represents zones 17 to 24, and so on ..

As in the table above, I have only two sensors to be registered and I plan to start from Zone 9, I have to program section 203.

The keys I will enter to enable the two zones 9 and 10 are

          *8 5555 203 1 2 # # #

If I also had another component to be registered in Zone 11, then I would have entered

          *8 5555 203 1 2 3 # # #

Step 2 - Assign Zone type definition
Now we define what each of these zone are going to do i.e. whether these are door sensors that need to activated immediately when a door alarm is triggered or whether you need a delay so that you have time to enter the "pin" to disarm your alarm or whether its a motion sensor that is not triggered when you enable your alarm in "Stay" mode, etc. The most common definitions used with their codes are

01 - delay 1

02 - delay 2

03 - instant

04 - Interior

05 - interior stay/away for motion sensors

06 - Delay stay/Away

13 - Gas

14 - heating

16 - Panic

17 - Emergency

19 - Water

20 - Freeze

In the above table listing my components, you will notice that I have decided to setup my zone type for front door sensor as 01 and for the main floor motion sensor as 05.
Now to set these zone type in the panel, you need to key in
          *8 5555 001 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 ###where 001 = section for assigning zone definition
rest are all zones from 1 to 16. So you assign definition type only where applicable it applicable for a zone
Similarly if you had components in zones 16-24, you will define them using section 002. So your codes to assign zone types to zones 17, 18 and 19 will be
          *8 5555 002 01 05 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ###

Step 3 - Enable wireless atrribute (only for wireless components/sensors)
You have enable the attribute for each zone that has a wireless sensor like the door sensor and motion sensor I have listed in my first post (EV-DW4975 or WS4904P). To enable this attribute, you will need to type
           *8 5555 1xx 8
where xx is the zone number. So to enable wireless attribute for zone 9 and zone 10, I will enter
           *8 5555 109 8
           *8 5555 110 8
Do note that after you type the section nos (109 or 110), in the keypad, you will see some nos from 1 to 8 like this "1 2 3  6  7" or something like that. That means, attributes 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 are enabled for that zone. After you enter 8, you will see that change to "1 2 3 6 7 8". So if 8 is seen that means that the wireless attribute is enabled for that zone. Do not change any other default attributes that might be enabled or disabled for that zone.

Step 4 - Enroll devices
To enroll devices, you need to understand what ESN number is. In all your sensors, you will see a number printed or stuck in a small piece of paper. This number is what is needed to enroll your devide to the panel. In my table above, for the door sensor's number is 2987F1. So to enroll the device, you need to enter
           * 8 5555 804 09 2987*6*1
where 804 = section to enroll wireless devices
09 = the zone number been enrolled
2987*6*1 = is the ESN number of the door sensor

What you might have noticed, while enrolling the device, the ESN is not the same as I had listed before and there are no alphabets. That is because there is no way to enter alphabets using the keypad. The alphabets are translated to numbers where A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, ........., Z= 26. Also before and after you enter the number for the alphabet, you need to enter a "*". So in the above example, F=*6*.
If you have a ESN number like 398FA4, where there are 2 alphabets together, your translated number you would enter would be "398*61*4"

That is about it for enrolling the devices. Now all devices should be recognized by your panel.

But there are a few more steps you might be interested in.

Assign delays for entry and exit
This is to setup the delay you would need when you arm the device and before you leave the building so that you that when you open and close the main door, it does not trigger the alarm. The same way you would need an entry delay when you enter home so that you have time to disarm the device. To set the delay, you would enter
               *8 5555 005 01 010 045 020
where 005 = section for setting this up
01 = partition (assuming this is for partition 1)
010 = 10 second delay for delay1 zone definition types
045 = 45 second delay for delay2 zone definition types
020 = 20 second delay for exit delay (when you arm and want to exit the building)

Note that the seconds are entered as 3 digit nos and not 2 digits.

Setting up EVL3 and creating scenes in Vera is another post and hope to get to it soon.

Hope all this typing helps people out there. I had a tough time setting this up and once I got the hang of it, it looked pretty easy. When I was struggling to set it up, I would have loved to have an article like this one for reference .. :-)