The bench test (1) - The Italian Job

Accepted wisdom has it that anything designed in Italy must be stylish and desirable – and not without good reason. After all, which of us would say no to a Ferrari or an Armani suit, and need we remind you of how close the Italian football team came to winning Euro 2000? Now from the country that brought you scooters and Paulo Maldini comes the DIR60. Inspired surely by the success of Apple's iMac computer, Italian manufacturer Domotec has produced a range of movement detectors in a selection of coloured translucent housings. So far so good, but is it a worthwhile exercise producing a piece of equipment designed to sell solely on its looks?

From a purely aesthetic point of view, these detectors look their best when placed on a white surface – thus becoming a fashion statement rather than trying to co-ordinate with surroundings.

The two-part case is constructed from ABS plastic in a variety of colours, with a visible, unattractive face-fixed screw at the top to secure the front cover. The cover has a relatively deep profile by modern standards – in fact, the overall shape did not find favour with the team, with seemingly little or no effort put into the size and shape of the case.

The fresnel lens has only 20 zones over four levels which accounts for the sluggish performance of the unit, though a mirrored optical reflector gives additional downward looking protection to achieve a usable creep zone.

The whole case is sealed against insect and dust intrusion, so the cable entry and wall mounting holes need to be created – though the few 'knock-out' positions only allow flat-face fixing to the mounting structure. For a traditional and preferable corner-mounted position, installers will need to buy the separately available swivel bracket, or an asymmetrical angled bracket.

Both of these installation aids work well, but they are essentially a substitute for poor design since a slightly deeper backplate with properly designed side fixing holes would achieve exactly the same result. Furthermore, these two brackets are only available in a white ABS finish, which somewhat negates the whole ethos of producing groovy coloured equipment.

Inside the case, the printed circuit board is secured by small grub screw holding it tightly in place. Adjustment of this fixing allows a small amount of vertical movement of the PC board to increase or decrease the working range of the sensor, up to a maximum of 15 metres when mounted at the recommended height of 2 to 2.20m.

The PC board is big and uninteresting, using surface mount technology and four sets of jumper pins to select sensitivity, control line polarity and pulse counting options. The walk test LED can also be disabled by deselecting an on-board link.

The Domotec DIR 60 has no memory latch, though a peculiar seventh terminal is available marked BL which effectively shunts the output relay and disables the LED when a voltage is applied from the control panel. The polarity of this applied voltage can be chosen to be positive or negative, using the on-board link pins marked TC. And no, we don't know what BL and TC mean either.

The unit is CE marked for European compliance and comes with a worthwhile five-year guarantee.  The detector performed more or less as per the manufacturer's specification, achieving a range of just under 14m, and a horizontal field of view of 85 degrees. The dual element sensor did not give the fastest possible 'catch' but the detection characteristics were found to be perfectly adequate. The change-over relay was particularly quiet on activation. It is surprising how many customers are annoyed by a clicking relay.

Performance

We found the current consumption to be slightly less than the quoted specification, at 12mA including LED indication. The relay output gave a reading of just over 6.0 ohms, though the anti tamper output was slightly lower, at 1.5 ohms.

By and large, the unit responded well to our series of tests.

The accompanying instructions are provided on a single printed A5 sized sheet with schematic diagrams for identification of parts and coverage patterns for the PIR detection area. The instructions are good enough with brief installation guidelines, but they are a translation from a European source, which sometimes does not read as well as it could.

There is no telephone number for technical support in the instruction booklet, nor on the cardboard packaging.

There is however a website available at www.domotec.it which contains an English language version including the full Domotec product catalogue with throbbing colour pictures and a company profile.

According to the website there is no UK distributor at this time, though the DIR 60 can be ordered on-line, directly from Domotec.

What the manufacturer says

The DIR60 is a passive infrared detector with creep zone. Features include:

• Nominal range 13m 
• Pulse count setting
• Sensitivity adjustment
• Detection pattern adjustment
• Superior RFI and EMI protection
• Alarm LED exclusion 
• Corner-mounting support included
• Interchangeable lens
• Horizontal detection angle of 100 deg
• 20 detection areas on four planes 
• Tamper circuit 1A 24v DC.

We also have a white swivel and a white bracket that we sell as an accessory together with a white base. If you mount the colour PIR flat on the wall, the coloured base will match the colour of the furniture or the wall. However, if you need a swivel or a bracket to tilt the detector for coverage purposes, it is advisable to use a white base because coloured swivels are not available and you may need to hide the white cable coming out of the wall.