Changing Function Keys On A DSC NEO Including A Full Description Of Keypad Programming Options

Hey guys, Hayden here again from alarm system store. And today we're going to be doing some keypad programming. So common question we get on keypads is how to change the function keys, which are these five buttons on the right side here. They can be programmed to do different functions depending on what you need them to do. So over here, these are your panic keys. Those are always going to be the same. You can turn these on and off, but you cannot change what they do. These top two if you hold them down, fire, medical, and then that's a duress, basically just a burglary panic.

Anyway, going into how these are going to be programmed. If you're familiar with the older DSC power series, you used to have to be on the keypad you're trying to change the function keys for or change the keypad settings at all. In the Neo, they've kind of revamped that and they allow you to adjust all keypads from the programming menu so that you don't have to go to each different keypad and set everything up in different locations. Basically just kind of streamlined it to make it easier. And real quick, before I get too far into this, there is going to be a short version of this video on our channel as well, where I just cover exactly what you need to do to change function keys. If you want to check that out, you're more than welcome to. If you want to stay, I'm going to talk about some extra stuff, talk about the other options you can find in keypad programming.

But anyway, diving in, we need to enter our programming so star eight plus our installer code, and then we need to go to section 860. So section 860 will tell you what number this keypad you're working with is. So if by chance, if you have multiple keypads and you're trying to adjust settings on multiple keypads, you can go to each of your keypads and type in 860 and it will tell you what number your keypad is. Now, I only have one on here, so obviously we just have one keypad one. And then once you are ready to change the settings for the keypad, you'll enter 860 plus the number of the keypad. So this is keypad one. So we would go to 861, which is keypad one programming. 862 is keypad two programming and so on.

Going into keypad one programming, there is a keypad partition mask so you can set what partition each keypad is assigned to. There is a global partition for keypads as well, generally not used as much, but this is where you would change that if you were going to. Now if we scroll right one time, option one is function key one and function key one is just the top function key which would be the stay. Now 2345 is just down in order, so 12345. So whichever button you are trying to change, go to that function key you're going to hit start and then you can actually scroll through all the different definitions or function options you have with those buttons. So with the neo you can do some pretty interesting stuff. You can night arm straight from the keypad there's a global stay arm and a global away arm function key so that you don't have to use a global keypad, but you can still arm your other partitions from a single keypad. So that's kind of cool. But going through there's a bunch of different definitions.

The keypad manual shows what all of these are and most of them are pretty straightforward. Command output might be a little bit confusing. Basically that activates a PGM. So if you have smoke detectors on your DSC system, you would be familiar with hitting star 72. Anytime the smoke detectors are set off, which would reset your smokes, you can actually set up a command output which would be command output two right here as like, let's say the reset button, which is actually what it's already defaulted at, but you can hold the reset button and that activates command output two, which activates pgm two. And if you have two wire smokes that will reset your smoke detector or if you have smoke detectors, period, because they're all supposed to be connected to PGM two. But anyway, I digress.

Anyway, going forward, basically there's just a bunch of different options you can choose from here. So whatever you want to change them to you're welcome to. After you do. So, make sure you back all the way out and test the functionality to make sure that it worked. But let's say we wanted no entry arming for our stay key instead of just normal stay. No entry arming, if you're unfamiliar with it, takes away the entry timer delay that you would have whenever you open a door to come into your home. So if you're staying home for the night and you just want to arm the system, you could set up no entry arm for your stay key. Hold that down and then all of your system is going to arm in stay mode and then all of your doors, any delayed sensors will be considered instant triggers instead of delay triggers. So set the function keys according to what you want.

And before I head out, I do want to cover some other keypad options that are here keypad I/O one that is talking about input output. Now if you're familiar with our channel and watch our videos, I did a video not long ago about using this P/Z terminal as either a PGM or a zone terminal on DSC neo keypads. And this is where you would decide what zone or what PGM is going to be tied to this keypad. Local PGM time that would be if you are using the keypad PGM as a PGM, you can set up a timer for it, which it does different things depending on what definition, but basically it's a timer that's attached to that PGM keypad option one. If you hit star on that, it's going to give you a few different options.

Now these buttons over here, these panic buttons, that's what these toggle options are talking about. So f would be your fire panic. You can enable or disable that. M is for your medical panic, P is for your burglary panic and then display code. I'm not 100% sure what display code does to be honest, but that is how you would disable these panic buttons over here. So generally you don't want to disable them because if needed it is nice to have those kind of very specific situations where you'll actually be at your neo keypad to be able to press these panics. But if you need to, you want the option to be able to do so. Now if you have kids or teenagers or whatever, and they just tend to mess with stuff when they shouldn't, then you can disable those to kind of make your life a little easier so that there's no false alarms happening.

But if we back out, we can go to keypad option two. Now in keypad option two you can decide whether this keypad is going to show the local clock on the screen whenever it's just in standby, you can set the clock to 24 hours mode auto alarm memory scrolling. So what that does is after the system has been in alarm, it will scroll through the alarm memory saying what happened basically. Any of these that say option with a number, those don't do anything. A lot of times they're just kind of left blank because they're for future use, I think is what they say.

But anyway, you can turn on or off the power led, which is this one right here. Now, I think with this option, the touch screen does have two leds that show power. So power led would be for the touchscreen one, and then power led. AC would be for this particular symbol here, which means you have AC power on these lcd keypads. It turns that off if either one of these options is off, period, alarm, disarm and arm. That allows you to see what state the keypad is in when it's armed. So by default, you would have this little lock up here if your system's armed. But if you turn this off, it won't actually tell you what mode the keypad is in. So it'll just say armed over here with the LED. And then the keypad would just show time or whatever it's scrolling through.

Auto scroll open zones. Now this is one. Anytime you power up a DSC, if you programmed your system, you immediately saw zones scrolling across the screen. You can actually turn that feature off. Now, if you want to manually scroll, you could go to the keypad and use the arrow keys on the main menu and it would scroll through the open zones. But the auto scroll just keeps it from doing it constantly. If you just have zones open, like if your windows are open or whatever, going back, there's only a maximum of eight options in any of these sections. So once you hit eight, that's the end.

Going into keypad option three. Arm led power save. Now what that means is if the keypad is in power save mode, which is a specific function, basically it's just depowered. The screens off that kind of stuff. It will show or not show the lock up in the top, right? So by default, that is off. So whenever the keypad shuts down its screen and goes into power save mode, then the leds are going to go off as well. It just helps save a little bit more power. You can turn that on if you want. That way you can see at all times if the keypad is armed or if the system is armed. Show arm status. That is basically what I was talking about earlier. I think I got that one actually mixed up with this one. This one would be showing the armed status of the keypad itself. The previous one that I talked about would be showing up when you first arm it. It says system armed in blah blah blah mode. So if you turn that other option off, it's basically not going to pop up with that notification when that event is triggered.

Now, PGM output, that is toggling on or off this terminal. So by default this wants that to be a zone. But if you come in here and you change this to a yes, then that will make that PZ terminal a PGM output instead of a zone. So that's covered in that other video, though. Prox tag arming. If this particular keypad does not feature prox tag arming or disarming, you would have a little target symbol over here. If you had prox tags, you can actually turn on or off prox tag arming or disarming by the keypad. So if I turn that off, this particular keypad would not be able to use prox tags.

Continuing to scroll, there is a local temp and a low temp warning. So if you have temperature sensors, you can actually come in here and have the system show what those sensors are reading at any given time. So if you have an indoor one, you can do local temp on, and one of the main menu screens that it scrolls through will show the local temperature according to that sensor. Low temp. That would be if you had a warning set up for your low temp sensor, this would pop up on the keypad instead of just being a trouble condition like it normally is. So it'd be a little bit more warning. Going back you can set an lcd message. I don't quite understand what this is for. I think it's more for like advertising or for companies that like to basically just have their brand on your system so they can make a custom lcd message that shows up occasionally. I've never messed with it. You're free to play with it, but I don't know what it does exactly.

So anyway, indoor temperature. So this is referring to that local temp that we were just looking at a minute ago. You can actually tell it what zone to watch. So if you have a specific temperature sensors that you want to watch or what, you would have to pick one, period. But depending on what sensor you want the system to show the local temperature for, you would have to come into this section and set up that zone. Outdoor temp. With local temp, you can show both indoor or outdoor. If you have an outdoor temperature sensor that you want to show the temperature of, set the zone number for that and then that's how you would do it going forward.

I'm not going to cover any more than this one. But basically the rest of the options are talking about the chime for each particular zone. So 101 is going to be zone one door chime, 102, zone two door chime. If you go into these, I'm sorry, hit the wrong button, you can change the sound of that particular zone's chime. So I think there's four different options. There's six beeps, bing, bong, ding dong, alarm, tone, zone name, if you have a voice keypad or just disable it. So by default, they're all set to six beeps, which is that whenever you open a door, that's what everybody is most likely going to use. But if you have a certain chime that you or a certain sensor that you want a different chime on, you can adjust that through here.

That is pretty much all keypad programming kind of shortly covered the majority of it. But if you're looking to kind of customize your keypads to give you a little bit more usability out of your system, that is how you would do. So, like I said, all of these function keys can be changed, these panic buttons can be toggled on and off, and you can adjust all that other stuff that we talked about. So hope this was informative and you guys enjoyed it. If you did, leave us a like and subscribe if you don't mind, and if you have anything to say, please leave us a comment and we will get back to you if we can. But that's going to do it for me and I will catch you guys on the next one.