Subscriber Discussion

Interfacing Milestone With GE Interlogix NX8E

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Ronen Isaac
Mar 02, 2017
Continental Computers / The Boring Lab

Hello, has anyone used the printer port on the NX8E > Serial to IP converter to send alerts in to Milestone for reporting status and alarms?  I would be interested in any experiences with this.  Thanks so much!

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Josh Hendricks
Mar 03, 2017
Milestone Systems

I haven't personally heard of anyone doing this and I don't see any relevant support cases in our tech support case history. But depending on how the NX8E works, you could certainly use it for events/alarms.

If there is a way for you to pipe it through a TCP serial server, you could configure the serial server unit to forward all data out to the IP of the Milestone server to whatever your generic event port is set to (TCP 1234 for example).

From there, you would just configure our software to look for specific keywords. If you don't know what kind of information is being sent out of the NX8E, you could first run a tool like Packet Sender to listen on TCP 1234 and just see what kind of data is being sent out under different circumstances. Then you can use that information to configure your "generic events" on our end.

Another possible option (albeit niche) is to use it with XProtect Transact. If the data coming out of the unit is formatted in a such a way that it has a predictable header and/or footer, you could receive the data with XProtect Transact which would allow you to format/store the data, react to specific data with events/alarms, and compare the "transactions" with video, even if it's not tied to a specific pre-defined event. That is probably over the top but just laying it out there as an idea.

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RI
Ronen Isaac
Mar 03, 2017
Continental Computers / The Boring Lab

Thanks Josh!  This is what I had in mind but was wondering if anyone had done it in the past as to not re-invent the wheel.  I do have a Lavalink ESL installed but can not seem to get data out of the panel via the serial/printer port so I have ordered a virtual keypad from GE as apparently that will output the appropriate information.  The only question is then, do I need to write 200 different alarms to monitor the different sensors and alarms from the panel?  Is there a relatively easy way via the SDK to integrate this into Smart Client similar to ACM door status?

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Josh Hendricks
Mar 03, 2017
Milestone Systems

I haven't personally written an ACM integration but it's reasonably easy to do so from our perspective if you're experienced in .NET development. The effort involved with creating alarms with matching generic events is probably comparable to writing a basic plugin. It's all subjective though, if you don't have C# experience, the generic event method would be light-years easier.

Either way, unless there is a way for you to query the panel for doors/alarms or they have predictable IDs, it's going to be a cumbersome process of defining which doors/alarms are available.

Hopefully someone here has some experience with the serial interface and can fill in the blanks.

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