Hello Hackers!
I have a question about something I would like to re-purpose to use in some other (not yet defined) project. You know I wanna hack me up a new toy...
The house I live in has an old security system in it, that is no longer in use, and looks fairly old and outdated. I have already pulled the board out of the control box for components. I have been taking apart discarded electronics for some time now, but haven't actually used something as it was built for another purpose.
I have enough electronics experience to identify many of the parts, read a circuit diagram and build a circuit, but not enough to look at an existing board and make it do what I want.
There is a motion detector (which I am assuming by looking at the sensor is PIR) that I took apart today, that was mounted on the wall close to the front door.
Looking at the board, it has 4 wires on it, power ground, and I am assuming in/out data lines to communicate with the control box. It also has three dip switches on it, two of which I am not sure what they do by their description on the inside of the cover. the third turns an LED on or off.
It has a handful of small caps, 4 diodes, a (according to the datasheet) reed relay (part # dss41a12), transistor, and the sensor on one side. The other side has a host of SMT parts on it, two of which are ICs (LM339 and a 27L2C rail to rail output op amp).
I know, without a diagram or a good look at the board this might not be useful information, but right now I have no way to upload photos to my computer (long story).
My question is, is there a way to hook this up to my arduino without running the risk of ruining it, and make use of the board as it is, or would I be better off just removing the sensor and maybe the reed relay (which I could use for another project down the road) and making use of the parts I can identify.
The sensor doesn't have any markings on it, it just has three pins and the sensor window in the case. I am not sure how to identify which pins do what on the sensor without a datasheet to identify them, and I have never used an IR sensor before to know what they would be (though I would guess they would be power ground and data pins).
If I can't make use of the board as is, is there an easy way to determine which pin on the IR sensor does what, so I can hook it up to a circuit without breaking the sensor? Multimeter maybe?
I understand this is a fairly vague (even with the length of this post) question, but I have provided all the information I can gather just by looking at the parts. If anything needs clarification, please let me know and I would be happy to answer any questions to the best of my limited ability.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated!
thanks
N8