EyezOn Forum

I have a DSC 1864 Alarm Panel recently installed with the following:
+ TR5164-433 wireless transceiver
+ WT5500 wireless keypad
+ EVL-3 Envisalink

I also have Veralite with UI5 and firmware at 1.5.622 (current). Both the EVL-3 and the vera are connected to my home router via ethernet. I use a vera plug in (DSC Alarm Panel Plug-in v0.38) to control my alarm panel which utilizes the EVL-3 of course. All communications seemed to be fine in that I could read the status just fine using the vera plug in but I was unable to arm or disarm the system using the vera plug in unless my wireless keypad was 'active' (meaning it was not blanked out). I eventually turned off keypad blanking and that solves the problem but the plug-in developer was hoping there would be more communications in the logs (verbose enabled) to help troubleshoot the issue. Best it shows is that the "System Error (Partition is Not Ready to Arm)" (error 502).

You can see the brief thread where I posed the issue and provided the details. Wondering if you're able to help troubleshoot. The thread is here:

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/ ... 336.0.html

When the panel has blanked the keypads, the Envisalink does not know the state of the partition and from its point-of-view, its busy. Hence the error.

You could try sending a dummy "#" to wake-up the panel and then arm but I'm just speculating.

Is there somewhere I can read up on keypad blanking?

It seems a little odd that the Partition state, on the panel itself, would be impacted by the keypad in any way.

Hello Mr. Guessed!

The Envisalink is effectively a keypad on a DSC system and DSC keypads are dumb as rocks. They are told in real-time what to display on the screen and that is then interpreted as partition state.

When a user has keypad blanking enabled (for paranoia or religious reasons), the panel tells all the keypads on that partition to show nothing and lists the partition state as "Unknown". The TPI software just gives up at this point and decides not to do anything until sanity is restored.

We've tossed around ideas to get around this but really it would come down to periodically waking the panel and getting the true partition state, and then let Keypad blanking kick in again. When we discussed this with the stakeholders (I love that word, sounds official), the concesus was that this would defeat the purpose of keypad blanking.

It sounds like Keypad Blanking is a Panel-level control then, not a Keypad-level control, which is how I originally interpreted it.

ie. The Panel itself sends the blanking message (or simply stops sending messages) to the Keypad(s), and by inference the 2/3DS unit.

When @johnfdl was using my plugin, it sounded like this was related to the [battery operated] WT5500 hitting that mode automatically. From more recent updates, it looks like a manual update (to KeyPad blanking) was explicitly done.

Anyhow, we'll add something to our Plugin's Doc to cover it, and hopefully this thread will show up in search when people have the same issue in other deployments.

ie. DSC's Keypad Blanking mode is not compatible with an EVL-3 or 2DS unit, and should be disabled (default).

Thanks everyone. Disabling keypad blanking is certainly a workable solution for me. I appreciate y'all helping get to the bottom of it.

Just got my first board installed (Envisalink 3), on a DSC system. I see why the iphone always shows as busy, ie; keypad blanking turned on in the DSC system.

Considering that when keypad blanking is OFF, the little red ARMED light is ON at each keypad, this can be quite annoying in a bedroom. For the DSC LCD type keypad series however, you can also see the system is armed by pushing any keypad button and viewing the LCD display. Therefore, I resolved my annoyance over the red ARMED light with a pair of wire cutters:) No more light and the iphone/URL apps now properly display system status. Who cares if non-bedroom keypads show lights. Easy fix!