Access & Alerts

• 1: Door / Gate
• 2: Bell
• 3: Electric Fence Active

1 - Door / Gate

The OGLAS door / gate node knows two things: when something is open, and how to open it on command. A paddock gate, a shed door, a depot roller door — same node, same wireless link as the rest of your sensors.

What it does

• Detects open/closed state — a reed or limit switch on the frame trips the device, which immediately reports the state change to your hub.
• Opens on command — a signal from the hub (or a button in your vehicle) pulses an output that drives your motor or relay. You can open a single door/gate or every one at once.
• Reports when it’s done — confirms back to the hub so you know the action ran.

The matching bell can ring a buzzer indoors the moment it trips — works as well on a farm entrance as on a yard gate or a shed left open overnight. See Monitoring and alerts.

Why it works off-grid

A door/gate node is always listening (it has to, to catch open commands), so it runs on mains or a small solar setup rather than batteries. The wireless range covers the typical gate-to-hub distance with no telco involved — see No telco dependency.

Building this into a larger site? That’s exactly what we do — start a custom build or email us.

2 - Bell

The OGLAS bell is the noise-maker. It sits in the house, the office, the shed — wherever you want to hear about things — and turns sensor activity into sound.

What it does

There are three ways the bell rings:

• Pattern match on incoming sensor activity — by default, when the gate opens, the bell triggers a single buzz. Rate-limited so a flaky link can’t replay the same event into a buzz-storm.
• Direct ring command — a single, immediate buzz with no cooldown. Use this for manual or scripted pings from the hub.
• Alarm mode — a repeating tone for a configurable window (default 60 s). Re-issuing the command extends the window.

Plus remote mute/unmute, and an on-board mute button that toggles silence with a fast-flashing LED to show the bell is alive but quiet.

Group ringing

Bells can be grouped so a single command rings every bell on site at once — useful if you have one in the house and one in the shed, or one in the office and one on the floor.

Pairs well with

• Gate — the most common trigger: gate opens, bell rings.
• Vehicle Track — chirp when someone arrives or leaves; alarm when a generator stops unexpectedly.
• Electric Fence — bell rings the instant the fence stops pulsing.
• Water Trough — out-of-water alert rings the homestead bell.
• Tank level — bell on tank-low to walk down and check.
• Smart Switch — failure or “load not running” alerts ring through the bell.

Building this into a larger site? That’s exactly what we do — start a custom build or email us.

3 - Electric Fence Active

An electric fence that’s stopped pulsing is just a fence — and animals work that out fast. The OGLAS Electric Fence Active sensor confirms your fence is live, on a schedule you set, and raises the bell the moment it isn’t.

What it does

• Detects fence pulses — non-contact pickup (capacitive coupling to the fence wire), no high-voltage wiring into the device.
• Reports state periodically — default interval is 5 minutes; configurable.
• Reports immediately on state change — fence drops from active to inactive (or comes back), the device fires off a message right away rather than waiting for the next interval. This is the alert that matters.
• Tracks pulse rate — a healthy charger has a known cadence. Drift from the expected rate (broken wire shorting to ground, low-battery charger) shows up before the fence dies completely.

Common failure modes it catches

• Animal grounding — a sheep tangled in the wire pulls the fence voltage down. Pulses still happen but at much lower amplitude. Worth alerting.
• Broken wire — fence is “on” at the charger but doesn’t reach the far end. Catch this by deploying multiple Electric Fence sensors at known points along the line.
• Charger fault / dead battery — fence is silent. Most-common failure mode and the one that costs the most.
• Vegetation grow-in — gradually loading the fence; the pulse-rate trend will show it before it fails.

Hardware

Battery-powered sensor with a non-contact pickup. The pickup is a small antenna held a few centimetres from the live wire — induced voltage from each fence pulse triggers a counter inside the device. No galvanic connection to the fence, so no risk of energiser pulses entering the electronics.

• Power: Single LiPo with a small solar trickle. Designed to run a season per panel-side charge in average sunshine.
• Mounting: Sealed enclosure, magnetically or zip-tied to the fence post near the wire.
• Ultra-low deep-sleep current — battery life is the design constraint.

Multiple along a long fence

A single sensor at the energiser tells you the charger is working. Sensors at intermediate points along the fence tell you the line is working. For long boundaries, deploy two or three:

Each one reports independently to the hub, with its own node name (fence-east, fence-far, etc.) so you know which segment failed.

Pairs well with

• Bell — fence drops, kitchen bell rings. The alert nobody on the property can ignore.
• Water Trough — the same family of “long-battery, GPS-pinned, alert-priority” sensors.
• LoRa Hub — logs the pulse-rate trend, raises threshold alerts.

Building this into a larger site? That’s exactly what we do — start a custom build or email us.