DSC NEO Global Keypad Demonstration

Hey, guys. Hayden here again from Alarm System Store. And today I thought I'd do a little demonstration on how global keypads work. If you're unfamiliar with global keypads, basically, whenever you partition out a system, which essentially means taking your one main system and creating small miniature systems for like sections of a house or multiple buildings or something like that, what you can do is you can take your keypads and set them as a global keypad so it has access to all partitions. Now, before we dive into this, I do want to let you know, generally, for most people, it's sort of difficult to get used to the UI for the global keypads on LCD keypads. So if you have regular, like button-style keypads like this, it is better to just go ahead and add a second keypad for that second partition and then have, you know, a partition one keypad and a partition two keypad. That just keeps things very simple. And you don't have to learn a new UI, or user interface.

However, there are people who do wish to use a global keypad. But as I mentioned, it can be a little bit confusing whenever you first do it. So I thought I'd just give a quick demonstration on how that's done. The reason I have a touchscreen here is because the touchscreens make using multiple partitions extremely simple. So I thought I would show that too. It is quite a bit more expensive than a standard keypad, but if you only want one keypad and you are going to have multiple partitions, I would go with the touchscreen just because it simplifies things a lot.

So anyway, today I have this new setup with two partitions. We just have a door contact on each zone. I just have them shorted with jumpers right there and on our keypad here. You saw the screen before. It was just the date and time like normal. However, when I hit a button, the first thing it asks is the access code. And basically it's asking for the master code. And any time you have your keypad set up as global, this is the default way it is going to operate. So the first thing you're going to do with the global keypad, if you want to access either partition to be able to arm it, you type in your master code. And what's going to come up is going to be a row of your partitions. So this is partition one, and that's partition two. Each one of them is going to have a letter underneath. Now the R right there basically means both partitions are ready to arm. If it is an N, it means not ready. But essentially it gives you the current status of your partitions. Now what you can do is, if you want to access just a specific partition, you use the arrow keys. Here you can scroll over, and it gives you the option to arm all partitions. You can just hit star, and it will arm both one and two, or whichever ones are ready. If you keep scrolling, though, you can arm partition one, you can arm partition two specifically, or you can press star to select the partition. Now, if we need to go into a specific partition, like let's say we want to see what zones are open, we have to select a partition.

So we'll go into partition one, and it says selecting partition one. And now we get to the normal screen that you would see for just a basic keypad. So it's going to say system is ready to arm. And it's not going to show any open zones right now because I don't have any. However, if I open zone one here, our zone one is attached to partition one. So you can see, since we are on partition one, it is showing zone one as open. Now if I open zone two, we will not see that on the screen right now. And that is because we are in partition one. This is one of the things that confuses a lot of people whenever they first start messing with this, because they'll have multiple zones open and they know it. However, when you're in a selected partition, you only see the zones for that partition. And since our zone two is attached only to partition two, we can't see it on this screen. So if we wanted to arm or whatever, we could just do so the normal way. So you can use your function keys. You can type in your code, so on and so forth. So from this point on, once we have a partition selected, it acts like the normal LCD keypad that you would be used to with just a single partition.

Now let's go ahead and close these real quick. Eventually, if you wait long enough, the selected partition will time out, and it'll go back to the overview screen where it tells you to enter your master code like we did a moment ago. However, if you do need to back out and select a different partition, you could do so manually by holding the pound key. So as you hold that, what it's going to do is it's going to kick you back to the global screen, essentially. So now we're back to enter our access code; plug that in. We can see our two partitions. We can scroll over to select a partition. And we can go to partition two. And then we're back to this type of screen. However, this is the partition two basic layout. So those are the basics of using it with the LCD keypad.

Personally, I don't find it very useful just because it does add time to accessing your system at all. So you know, if you want to go see what open zones you have, you have to select that partition. You got to go in, check them back out, go to the other partition, so on and so forth. Personally, I just don't like that. So that is why I recommend having an LCD keypad for each partition. Now one thing that is a lot nicer on the Neo as compared to like, older DSC systems. If you're familiar with that, you can actually go into your different user menus without needing to go into a partition. So, like on the older PowerSeries, you had to go into a partition before you could, like, enter programming, for example. However, on the Neo you are able to just hit star eight, plug in your installer code, and then you can get into programming. So they did fix that a little bit. So that makes that a little bit nicer. 

However, as I mentioned, I brought the touch screen just so I could show you guys how much simpler it is to use these than it is to add those extra steps in your LCD UI. So on the touch screen, by default it is going to be looking at whatever partition you have been assigned to. By default, that's going to be partition one, which usually works out; partition one is like the main area that you know the users are going to be in. And now on the touchscreen you can see up here at the top it says partition one. If we wanted to arm it, we could just click that green bar, and it would start the arming countdown. And you have a zone status option here. Now if we click on that, you can see that zone one is showing on there, and it is showing zones 3, 4, 5, etc., and that is only because I did not disable them from partition one. They don't have anything programmed in them; however, they are still available on partition one, so they're showing up. However, you can see that zone two is missing, and that is because, as I mentioned, zone two is attached to partition two. So if we wanted to check those, we just click the options here. We click on partition status. You do have to plug in your master code. But from here you can select which partition you want to access. Click it, and then you're on partition two. If we click Zone Status we can see that zone two is available there and shows the status for it. And that is because we're looking at partition two. Now. So you know, it might just be my personal preference that I like the touchscreen a lot better. But I find using this menu to view the partitions a lot easier. One, because if you do label your partitions, you can have, like, partition one labeled, you know, main House, and it'll show up on here. Partition two could be the garage. So on whatever. However, another nice thing is that instead of just having a letter that you have to know what it means, like the R, the N, etc., it actually tells you what partitions are ready to arm, and it uses the full language. So it's a lot easier to read and understand what you're looking at. 

So for example, if we go ahead and open zone two right here, so now that we have zone two open, if we go into our partition status screen. We can see that partition two is not ready. So again, it's personal preference, obviously. However, I much prefer the touch screen version of global. And it doesn't require that you go in and program the keypad as a global keypad. These touch screens by default are just able to access any partition using that partition status screen. So I like that a lot more. It's a lot less work. It's a lot less memorization. Trying to, you know, obviously figure out what you're doing on these LCD keypads. Like I said, if you're hesitant about using this because you've used it on a previous DSC system and you didn't like it, these LCD keypads are better now than they used to be. However, again, that touch screens going to beat that out generally for most people.

But hopefully that gives you guys a rough idea of how to use global keypads with the DSC neo. Like I said, it's not a terrible setup. It is just a bit confusing, especially if you've used your system with just one partition for a while, and then you decide to add a second partition, and then you get this whole new UI to work with, like nothing's going to be the same until you go into those specific partitions, and then you'll get to your, you know, normal front screen, whatever you want to call it. So, but anyway, that's going to do it for this video. If you guys have any questions, by all means leave it down below. If you enjoyed the video, please leave a like and subscribe, and I will catch you guys on the next one.