Another set of sensors is made by Visonic. Here’s the door sensor:

It has three sources of triggers: a reed switch, normally kept closed with a magnet on the door or window, an extra set of ordinary contacts, and an internal switch which is released when the case is opened.

There are other sensors using the same protocol, such as a PIR motion detector and a “universal transmitter”.

The sensors send OOK data on the 868 MHz band, but it took me a while to figure it all out. The main reason being that I couldn’t find a preamble for these radio packets – apparently there is none! – instead, the tail of the packet is a good reference point, i.e. the 72 pulses preceding the long pause at the end can be reliably decoded.

Each bit is either a short-long pulse pair, or a long-short pulse pair. This can in fact be used to resync even before the end of the packet is reached, because short-short and long-long combinations indicate that we’re off sync.

The total packet has 72 pulse transitions, i.e. 36 bits of data. I add 4 extra zero bits to create a 5-byte result. Here is the main decoding logic:

Here is some sample output:

I’ll postpone decoding of the actual bit pattern to another day but note that you don’t really need to interpret all the bits: just look which patterns your sensor is sending out under various conditions, and you can match the incoming packets accordingly.