Crestron Home Archives

Make your 2N a real Crestron Home lock — with PIN users and a log of who came through

Web Admin on September 2, 2026

You can already open a 2N’s door from Crestron by pulsing a relay. But a pulsed relay isn’t a lock. It has no state you can trust, no users, no schedule, and no answer to the question every client eventually asks: who opened the door, and when?

The 2N Native Lock driver closes that gap. It drives the 2N’s strike through a switch output and reports live state back from the device, so the door appears in Crestron Home as a native lock — a standard lock tile with proper Locked/Unlocked state, events, PIN users and schedules. Not a relay dressed up as a lock. A lock.

A native lock, not a workaround

Because it’s built on the Crestron Home entity model, the door behaves like any other Crestron lock. It shows the real state on the tile — read from the 2N’s event log, not guessed — so if someone opens the door on the keypad, Crestron knows. Lock and unlock are exposed to scenes, schedules and quick actions the same way every native lock is.

Lock commands are always sent to the device, even when the tile already shows the target state, so a stale reading can never leave a door in the wrong state.

Who and when

This is the part clients remember. PIN users are managed in Crestron Home’s own lock settings, and when someone enters their code the driver reports “Unlocked from keypad,” attributed to the matching user. The commissioning app keeps a live access log — newest first, each entry tied to a person — which is exactly the who and when a plain lock tile never shows.

Schedules are enforced as a rolling validity window, which makes them fail-secure: if the processor goes offline, access expires rather than staying open. A caretaker’s 8-to-6 stays 8-to-6 even if the network drops.

[Screenshot to add: the commissioning app’s attributed access log]

An app that signs the job off

The driver includes an installer-facing commissioning app, served from the processor — no internet or extra software. On site it lets you:

Test the strike — fire Test unlock and Test lock from your browser and watch the door physically release, without walking back and forth.
Prove the connection — a troubleshooter runs a sequence of checks against the 2N (network, HTTP API, credentials, services, the strike switch) and tells you how to fix anything that fails.
Validate a user before you leave — the emulator runs the driver’s real access rules for a chosen user, method and time, so you can confirm a new PIN or a schedule window without waiting for it.

It plays well with the intercom driver

The Native Lock driver and the 2N Doorstation driver run on the same site. Use the Native Lock for the front door you want managed as a lock, and the Doorstation driver for raw switches, inputs and SIP calls elsewhere on the same unit.

Spec it for the door that matters

For a front door, a gate, or a plant-room the client wants controlled and audited, this turns a 2N you may already be fitting into a managed access point — with users, schedules and an attributed log — and no separate access-control system to buy or wire.

The 2N Native Lock driver is a licensed product — a 30-day trial and full licences are on its product page. Compatibility, user management and the commissioning app are covered in the 2N Native Lock driver pages on lcd.network.

Hero image: Photo by Danielle Rice on Unsplash.

Modern building with illuminated windows at dusk.

An alarm from parts you already have: UI Dynamic + Sonos as an alert fabric

Web Admin on September 2, 2026

A leak sensor under the sink. A contact on the wine-cellar door. A temperature probe in the plant room. Each can do exactly one useful thing when it trips: send an HTTP request. On its own that’s a notification nobody sees. Paired with the Sonos speakers already in the house, it’s an alarm — audible in every room, repeating until someone deals with it, and with no separate alarm panel to buy or wire.

Two LCD drivers make the fabric: UI Dynamic to catch the webhook and Sonos Chime to make the noise.

Sensor to scene, in one request

Every UI Dynamic control has a webhook URL that fires a Crestron Home event. Hand that URL to whatever the sensor can call — its own webhook field, a Home Assistant automation, a Node-RED flow — and the moment the sensor trips, a Crestron event fires. From there it’s ordinary Crestron programming: bind a scene to the event.

No bridge, no cloud middleman. The sensor speaks HTTP; UI Dynamic turns that into a Crestron trigger.

An alert that won’t be ignored

The scene fires the Sonos Chime driver. Two settings make it a real alert rather than a polite ping:

Repeat until stopped. A chime set to repeat 0 times repeats until something calls StopChime. An intruder or a flood shouldn’t stop on its own — this one doesn’t.
A pinned volume. Pin the alert chime to its own high volume and it ignores the house-default ChimeLevel. So a night-mode scene that quietens the music at 11 pm can’t quietly turn the flood alarm down to a whisper. If you pinned it to 95, it stays 95.

Give each sensor its own spoken announcement — “Water detected in the utility room”, “Plant room over temperature” — and the house tells you not just that something’s wrong, but what.

[Screenshot to add: a Sonos Chime set to repeat 0 (until stopped), or the UI Dynamic Webhooks tab]

Arm, disarm and acknowledge — on the tile

Because a repeating chime needs a stop, the acknowledge belongs on a tile the client can reach. A UI Dynamic control does both jobs:

An arm / disarm control — a two-state button whose state your programming checks before letting the alert scene run.
An acknowledge control whose press calls StopChime to silence the alert once someone’s on it.

Every call in and out is recorded in UI Dynamic’s activity log, so during commissioning you can trip the sensor, watch the webhook arrive and the chime fire, then acknowledge it — all without a processor console.

Spec it as a safety net, not a security system

This isn’t a graded intruder alarm, and it shouldn’t be sold as one. What it is: a cheap, flexible alert layer over sensors and speakers the client already owns — the leak, the freezer door left open, the plant room, the gate at 2 am — made loud, house-wide and acknowledgeable, using two drivers on the existing processor.

Both are licensed products with a 30-day trial and full licences on their product pages — UI Dynamic and Sonos Chime. The webhook setup is on the UI Dynamic webhooks page, and the chime, repeat and volume settings are on the Sonos Chime pages, both on lcd.network.

Hero image: Photo by Shang Zhou on Unsplash.

Your 2N intercom, finally programmable in Crestron Home

Web Admin on September 2, 2026

A 2N intercom is doing a lot of work at the front gate. It has relays for the strike and the gate motor, digital inputs watching the door contact and the request-to-exit button, a camera, a call button, and a SIP stack that can ring a phone anywhere. On most jobs Crestron Home sees almost none of it — the intercom rings a handset, opens a door, and stays a closed box beside the drive.

The 2N Doorstation driver opens that box. It exposes the 2N as a programmable control surface in Crestron Home: every switch, every input, the relay and output, and SIP call control — each one a tile control, a programming action you can call, and a programming event you can react to.

Everything the 2N can do, in programming

Add the driver and the intercom’s hardware turns into named pieces you can wire up:

Switches 1–4 — energise or de-energise each 2N switch to release a strike, trigger the gate, or drive a relay, from a scene, a schedule, or the tile.
Digital inputs 1–4 — the live open/closed state of a door contact or exit button, on the tile and as input opened / input closed events.
Relay and output — state changes surfaced to programming.
SIP call control — call the Crestron touch panels (or a custom SIP target) and hang up, when the 2N has a registered SIP account.

So the gate strike becomes a Crestron action, the door contact becomes a Crestron event, and the intercom can ring the panels in the house — all inside the programming you already build.

Events fire however the door was opened

The driver doesn’t just watch its own commands. It monitors the 2N’s event log, so a switch, input, relay or output event fires whether the change came from a Crestron scene, from the tile, or directly on the 2N — a keypad code, a request-to-exit button, a fob. There are also events for motion, noise and a call-button press.

That is the difference between “I know when Crestron opened the door” and “I know when the door opened.” Bind your notification, your log, or your welcome scene to the event and you catch every case, not just the ones your own automation caused.

[Screenshot to add: the 2N Doorstation tile — Switches / Inputs / Call Control]

A setup app that proves the wiring

The driver ships a browser-based Diagnostics & Setup app, served from the processor. It shows the live connection, streams the device event log, runs a connection troubleshooter that checks the network, the HTTP API and the credentials in order, and lets you fire test actions — pop a switch, place a call — from your laptop without walking back to the gate. Commission it once, prove it, sign it off.

The upgrade is painless

This is the current, web-configured version of the long-standing 2N Basic Http driver, rebuilt on the Crestron Home entity model. It keeps the same product SKU (CHTWONHW), so an existing licence key still works — there is no repurchase. Device actions are gated until the driver is licensed; feedback and the diagnostics app run regardless.

It also sits happily alongside the 2N Native Lock driver on the same site: use the Native Lock when you want the door to appear as a standard Crestron Home lock with PIN users, and the Doorstation driver for raw switches, inputs and call control.

Spec it because it needs no new hardware

The intercom is already on the wall and already on the network. The driver turns hardware the customer has already paid for into a first-class part of the Crestron system — no rack module, no bridge box, no cloud account.

The 2N Doorstation driver is a licensed product — a 30-day trial and full licences are on its product page. Compatibility, the full control/event list and the setup app are documented in the 2N Doorstation driver pages on lcd.network.

Hero image: Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash.