Get Status of PIR when system is armed

[DaKevster]

I've seen a couple posts/feature requests going back a year or two, and also on Homeseer forum around this. Figured worth a poke to see if anyone has a solution.

I just finished getting my Vista 20P, EVL4, and Homeseer3 all talking together and all is working well when in disarmed mode. I would like to use status from a couple Vista interior hard-wired motion detectors to trigger HS events, when in armed-stay mode. For example, use living area Vista motion to turn on/off lights at night if someone gets up. It doesn't appear that EVL sees/reports status change on the motions while in stay mode. Looking at EVL dashboard while in Stay mode, there are no status changes showing for the motions.

I posted to reddit homesecurity forum and one person claims (with pictures) that they have this working (getting motion status in Homesser through EVL from Vista sensors while in Stay mode), but they didn't do the programming, didn't know how it was done. So it does seem possible, I just don't know how. Any ideas or am I just left getting some Z-wave battery wireless motions dedicated to HS3 for the homeauto functions I want?

[jac1987]

Isn't true that on vista panels you can get pir sensor status while on stay/away mode?

[NonTech]

I'm gonna throw this out there, but maybe put the PIR sensor(s) in a separate partition that is not armed while the main partition is armed? Might work if your windows and doors have contacts installed and the PIR are just "belt and suspenders".

Good luck.

Thinking out loud, wouldn't it make more sense to add additional PIR sensor(s) at the appropriate locations, to the alarm system and put those duplicate PIR sensor(s) on a separate partition that is not armed while the main partition is armed. By so doing, the original PIRs remains active in away mode and the new duplicate PIR sensor(s) (on separate Partition) are active in both away or stay modes and will send signals to Homeseer3 or any other third party devices.

[user17600]

Having owned a Vista 20 (and now a DSC), the Vista panels *do not* transmit the status of PIRs when in an armed mode.

This is a limitation of the Vista panels (and an apparent advantage of DSC).

This is not an EVL thing, it's a Honeywell thing. If that Reddit reviewer pulled it off (short of having the PIRs in a separate partition that was not armed, as previously noted), there would be a significant amount of interest.

I wrote my original reply in 2014 when I owned house with a Vista panel, and I write this now owning a house with a DSC panel.