I recently moved into a new house which came with a GE alarm system setup. It includes a 2Gig GC3 panel, secondary keypad, Kwikset 910 smart locks, some WTZ005 3-way switches, and various door and window sensors which I’m not sure if they are 433MHz or Z Wave (I assume Z Wave like everything else). I have full access to the GC3 panel, including installer codes.
I do not want to pay up to $40/mo for a company to monitor this system, and I’d much rather have full control over everything myself, so I am trying to integrate everything with Home Assistant. I’d like to keep the primary panel to use as either the primary or secondary controller with Home Assistant filling the other role. I could rip everything out and buy all new equipment though that’d obviously be my absolute last resort. I’d like to avoid having to relearn all the ZWave devices if possible, as apparently the switches require a Minimote to setup? I do not have one of these and cannot find any. I did purchase a Nanomote but I’m not sure if it has the same functionality.
Could I setup HA as a secondary controller to the GC3 panel, and give HA the ability to control all the ZWave devices that are already paired with the GC3? Or is it pretty much a given that I will have to reset everything and re-add every device one by one to HA (some of which I’m not even sure I can reset/relearn or if HA supports them)
Any guidance on the subject is greatly appreciated!
@AH6,
Although I can not answer you question directly, I can add some insight. I use a Vera Secure controller as my primary Zwave interface to HA. It can talk to the 433mhz 2Gig door and window sensors I have installed. This works just fine for me when the Vera Secure is stable. Recently it has been a lot less stable and I looked into adding the 2Gig alarm panel as my z wave controller. I found that there is no API to connect the alarm panel to Home Assistant. Big bummer. In my discovery process I came across several interesting things though. It seems that you can link a 2Gig door sensor to more than one device, such as my Vera and the 2Gig panel. They are simply addressed and not paired like zwave devices. So, two independent controllers can see the status of an individual door sensor and act accordingly. Such as trigger an alarm or sound a door opening tone.
In addition, I know that my Vera can bridge to another zwave controller, so there is also the possibility of adding the 2Gig alarm panel as a bridged component. I have successfully bridged two Vera units but not a Vera and another manufacturer simply because I don’t own one yet.
Lastly, I believe the issue of the MiniMote is simply due to the fact that the 2Gig panel is mounted to the wall and therefore not able to be brought close enough to a remote device to pair. A simple solution I use all the time is a short power cord that I can attach to my newest zwave outlet or switch to perform the pairing process. Yes, you need to be very careful around live electrical devices sitting on your countertop, but it is a solution that allows for “pre installation” pairing and testing and should work for the 2Gig panel as well.
So the bottom line is there is no direct API for the 2Gig panel to Home Assistant but there may be other options. I’m sure you could pick up a used Vera controller pretty cheap and it might be worth a shot.
I hope this information was helpful.
@kartcon,
Thanks for your input. My door/window sensors are addressable as well, so maybe they are 433MHz too. That’d make interfacing with them easier, since it’s fairly straight forward to read the signal broadcast on 433MHz when a door opens or something, I could even reverse engineer it with a software defined radio if I need to like I did with a wireless doorbell back in the day. So that shouldn’t be too hard to get working, I just need an 433MHz RF receiver for the Raspberry Pi. I’ll remove one of the sensors from a door and play around with it.
The 2Gig Panel integration will be a little more tricky. I will experiment with it more tonight. I’ve thought about seeing if I can reverse engineer any of the communications between the panel and the secondary controller/keypad. I’m also curious if there is any API at all. It can integrate with Alarm.com obviously, I wonder if I could spoof that in some way if all else fails? Act as my own Alarm.com server? Probably not but worth a thought. Might do some packet sniffing and see what the 2Gig is transmitting/receiving.
If all else fails I’ll probably just remove all devices from the GC3 panel, add them to the RPI, and then setup my own tablet panel instead of using the GC3. I am currently using a Raspberry Pi with a ZWave/Zigbee USB stick as my controller.
This information got me excited as I have 30+ wireless window and door sensors on my 2gig system. I bought the Sonoff RF bridge to learn my sensors are 345mhz NOT 433mhz. I can’t seems to find many ways to incorporate these sensors into home assistant.
Hello all, I recently just started to get into this HA stuff which has been pretty fun. I have a 2gig gc3 panel and alarm.com of course. I’d like to bypass the alarm.com integration and and the panel talk directly to my HA. I know this is an older post but was hoping ya’ll might have found something that has worked for you. I have over 30 door/window sensors and really don’t want to switch them all over to z-wave.
Thank you so much!
I pretty much gave up on doing anything with the 2Gig panel itself cause I didn’t have the patience to reverse engineer it. I put a SDR (software defined radio) dongle on my Home Assistant Pi and set it up to look for all my 433 Mhz door/window/etc sensors. Then I reconfigured any ZWave devices (lights, door locks, etc) to be controlled by the ZWave dongle on the Pi. Mainly just had to carry a laptop around and perform the reset operation for that particular device (for the lights it was press down 3 times and then hold or something). Now everything works well, but took some effort. I left the 2Gig panel up because even though I don’t actually use it for much, it still reads the door and window sensors and such so when I open my door it announces the door has been opened which is nice. I mainly control stuff via my phone and HA otherwise.
Now I can control all my lights, door locks, and get data/notifications from my door/window sensors in Home Assistant. I didn’t uninstall any sensors or devices that came with the house, I just switched them all to HA and removed the cellular card from the 2Gig panel. In the future I may revisit it again but for now it does everything I need it to do. 90% of which is just turning on the front porch light for deliveries and locking my doors remotely, ha.
Sorry I don’t have better news for you! If there’s a way to integrate the panel directly, someone else will have to find it.