ELK M1 Interface

Third party integrations
1152

I’m at gwwaters at gmail

1153

I sent an email with the log file.

Just to clarify, the sensor.elkm1_elkm1 remains “paused” after exiting RP2, but HA and elk do resume communicating when I exit RP2. So the sensor remains “paused” when it should have changed back to “connected.” The only way I have found to get the sensor back to “connected” is to “reload.” And doing that resets zone and output histories.

1 Like
1154

Perfect. I should be able to reproduce this. It will be next week before I can take a look. I’m not able to access my system until then.

1155

Running 54 wired zones across 4 ELK expander boards. Here’s what I’ve learned about zone wiring that the manuals don’t emphasize enough:

Know your NO vs NC voltages. This is the single most important thing. At the panel board terminals:

  • Normally Open (NO) zones rest at ~13.6V, drop when triggered
  • Normally Closed (NC) zones rest at ~0.64V, rise when triggered

If you inherit a system, grab a multimeter and check every zone at the board. If the voltage doesn’t match the panel’s zone type configuration, you either have a wiring issue or a misconfigured zone. Misconfigured zones fail silently — they either false alarm constantly or never trigger at all.

Map everything in a spreadsheet. I track: board number, board position, zone number, physical location, sensor type (NO/NC), wire color, and verification status. At 54 zones it’s the only way to stay sane. You’ll reference this constantly when building automations.

Board positions vs zone numbers: Board 1 positions 1-16 = zones 001-016. Board 2 positions 1-16 = zones 033-048. Board 3 = 049-064. Board 4 = 065-080. The gap between boards trips people up. Not all positions are necessarily wired — I have boards with 16/16, 13/16, 16/16, and 9/16 wired respectively.

Common troubleshooting:

  • Zone shows violated but sensor is closed → Check voltage. Probably a NO/NC mismatch or a broken wire (open circuit reads as violated on NC zones).
  • Zone never triggers → Sensor might work (LED blinks) but the wire run to the panel could be damaged. Swap the wire to a known-good zone input at the board to isolate panel vs wire vs sensor.
  • PIR giving false triggers → Before rewiring, try taping the lens to confirm it’s the sensor and not electrical noise on the wire. I had a noisy PIR that I taped temporarily while troubleshooting — saved me from chasing a wiring ghost.

Magnetic contact sensors: Make sure the magnets are actually installed. I had two zones where the sensors were wired correctly but someone never installed the matching magnets on the door frame. Wiring looked perfect, sensors showed up in HA, but they could never trigger because there was no magnet to detect.

1 Like
1156

Is there a way to increment or decrement an Elk counter instead of just setting a specific value?

This is as far as I’ve gotten so far.
I added a refresh to make sure I have the current value and I’m not worried about race conditions where the counter is updated by two different things at once.

For example:

alias: Sun Increment 1
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: sun
    event: sunrise
    offset: "-00:15:00"
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: elkm1.sensor_counter_refresh
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: sensor.elkm1_my_counter
    data: {}
  - action: elkm1.sensor_counter_set
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: sensor.elkm1_my_counter
    data:
      value: WHAT GOES HERE?
mode: single
1157

No. The Elk protocol only supports reading and writing of counters.