Sunday, May 4, 2014

Integration I was doing before it was ever called that and most Integration company's ever came into existence

Integration everyone claims to do it now and act like there poop smells better than any one else's . But the truth myself and many older electrical technicians where doing it before many of those claiming to be experts at it where even born.
Integration is nothing new its been around since the 1970's  and even earlier when the melting together of old school electron tubes and and mechanical devices started being changed to solid state electronics to drive equipment.
Back then technicians like myself and  others had to use relays and diodes and capacitors to get certain functions to be able to have an alarm do what you wanted like bypassing certain zones and tripping phone dialers to operating gates and sirens.

One of the cool installs I did back in the early 80's was at the then" Appliance Store" chains headquarters  along Penn Ave. in Pittsburgh E. liberty Section.
Seems they had a problem with late hour delivery of high end electronics like VCR's which needed secured and would mean having people on duty 24/7 for the arrivals.

They came up with an idea what if they could secure one of the single garage door bays with its own alarm which delivery driver could operate from seat of there truck. they called over to near by Triangle Electronics which has been bought out and resold several time now and talked to the late Frank Mazur who gave them several names of guys who could help them with it including me. After looking at it all declined as this involved a commercial garage door with 230 volt  3 wire  3 button controller.
being an electrician and an electronics guy I looked at it and said yes I can do this.

I rigged up a  Moose MPI-25 alarm with motion sensors  that was tied to one channel of a 4 channel
Linear wireless controller.  so it could be armed and disarmed remotely. via a key switch input.
I then rigged up a metal box with 3 relays to simulate the buttons being pushed.  which where tied to the remaining 3 buttons on the remote. outside in a existing lock box controller I wired 2 small LED lights so drivers could see if system was armed or not and disabled the wiring to controller so it could not be operated externally should some one break into the box .

It worked fantastic the driver would pull up see if alarm was on  he would then dis arm pull in truck .Go outside  close garage door down and arm system . Problem solved it worked well for several years until the chain went bankrupt.

Even today with modern integrated all in one control panels this would still be a challenge for 99.9% of the installers out there but not for me. But that's the difference between me and other so called integrator's
I understand and can design circuitry something they no longer tech in schools which is relay logic.
Dam shame because all I see any more are poorly trained techs with out the drive to design and fabricate like we did in the old days.

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