Raspberry PI meets Nano Alarm Panel

The last 3 weeks have been spent getting up to speed with the Raspi and determining the quickest way of interfacing it with the Nano Alarm Panel (based on the Ciseco XRF board).The end goal was two fold, firstly to read the alarm sensor triggers which later could form the basis of a Raspi Alarm and secondly to be able to arm/disarm my existing SL5 control via the Raspi. I guess another goal was the see if the XRF board could be powered from the Raspi therefore reducing the dependency on an external power source.
As the Nano Alarm Panel already exposes a serial interface the logical choice was to connect the Raspi using the GPIO serial port. However its being widely discussed that the GPIO 3.3v can't supply much current therefore powering the XRF board from the PI may not be possible. Instead I opted to use one of the usb ports because these should be capable of supplying up to 100mA. I used a cheap FDTI serial to usb adaptor which fortunately also had 3.3v output pins to the supply the XRF board.

The XRF powered up with any problems and there have been no stability issues with it powered from the Raspi USB port. This is probably mitigated by the fact the XRF uses a relativity low power RF MCU in the form of the CC1110, looking at the datasheet peak current consumption is less than 40mA.

The next step was to soak test the Nano Alarm Panel code which currently was just dumping the alarm sensor triggers to the serial port. I wrote some C code on the Raspi which read the serial port and dumped the sensor trigger data to a MySQL database. This was complemented with some php scripts running under to lighthttpd to view the data in a browser. The Raspi proved valuable because it allowed me to run numerous long running tests (12 to 24 hours) replacing a PC consuming 200-300 watts of power. These tests resulted in me finding a number a bugs in the Nano Alarm Panel code. Below is the sample output collected while running my tests showing the sensors triggered through a short period in the day. Collecting the sensor triggers can be useful for example I can roughly determine how long my morning runs are by the front door contact trigger.

Having read that the CC1110 also has a built in ambient temperature sensor, I updated the Nano Alarm Panel code to periodically (every 5 minutes) output the temperature, this was done without 1 or 2 point calibration which would have giving better results and as per the TI design note. This change was also made as a result of me wanting to soak test the Debian build as more data would be written to the MySQL database in a 24 hour period, around 300+ per day.

So .... the end results are the Raspi ran 24x7 for over 8 days, collecting around 2700 data readings. Best of all this is running using a £1 ipod power adapter and min usb cable. I stopped the tests after this period so that I could continue developing as I wanted to create additional code to arm/disarm from my phone which should be covered in my next blog. Here's the uptime for the Raspi and the number of data points.