wire in parallel to alarm panel?

[pikeaggie]

I don't have an alarm panel that interfaces with homeseer. To avoid buying another alarm panel and spending a lot of money, I was hoping to piggyback on some of the wiring done for the alarm system. Is is possible to wire in parallel to the currrent panel and go to a board like the weeder or webcontrol board to sense the door open/window open event that the alarm panel picks up? not sure what it is called but i am pretty sure the windows per room are wired in series back to the panel and there is constant voltage running through until one of the magnetic contacts is broken and the voltage goes away.

so if i wired in parallel would i need to go to a relay of some sort to convert it to send voltage to the webcontrol or weeder board when voltage disappeaars on the alarm circuit. as far as i know they are made to sense voltage, not when voltage disappears.

I am a little confused so any help would be greatly appreciated. no electrical background trying to learn on the fly.

[mrhappy]

I've done similar, all of my alarm PIRs are interfaced into HomeSeer via a Velleman K8055 board and all I did was wire in parallel to the zones on the alarm board with CAT5 (four pairs, four PIR's into HS) straight into the K8055, it picks them up fine but they are reversed (on for no motion, off for motion) which does not cause any real problems - just need the opposit event logic.

I think the K8055 has darlington drivers on the inputs so the board is quite protected, I think the outputs from the zones would probably be at 12V so whatever interface board you use you want to make sure its happy accepting the voltage.