Hi everyone - apologies if my question is redundant because I simply don’t understand the terminology that I am trying to ask for…
I am remodeling my house and have installed a number of hard-wired sensors throughout the house (door/window contacts, motions, etc), and I am trying to determine how to best connect those sensors to HA. I have seen the RPI GPIO/breadboard projects, and while that could work, I am wondering if there is anything with an actual integration that is local?
Specifically, I am looking to find something that communicates only locally and does not communicate out to the cloud for anything.
Are there any intrusion alarm systems that integrate with HA that do that, and I’m just misunderstanding how they actually work?
You could capture all of those hard-wired sensors using a number of options. Since they would currently come back to a central location I would look to use something like a NodeMCU to monitor them all and relay that info to HA via MQTT. That doesnt require any cloud stuff at all. You could then use this custom_component to create an alarm system in HA.
Ademco Vista 20P panel ($45) + AlarmDecoder USB ($90) is something you should consider. Up side is that it’s a professional alarm system so it gives you options going forward and it just works. Keypads are expensive ($100 for one w/ wireless sensor receiver) and I think it won’t report sensor trips when armed if the sensor is set to not trigger the alarm. I think my complete system (panel, siren, keypads, lots of wireless sensors) ran about $450 and if you have some DIY skills, it’s easy to install. If you want a real alarm system that also integrates into HA, I think the 20P is a good option (DSC panels are also supported by the alarm decoder module so you could look at those as well).
Cool. Let me know if you have any questions. I think the biggest “issue” w/ DSC/Ademco + alarm decoder (AD) is that the AD only has access to the information a keypad has. The panels aren’t designed for home automation - they’re alarm panels first and the automation is an add on. For example if you wire interior motion sensors into the panel, I don’t think they’ll report when the panel is armed in “home stay” mode when motions aren’t active. For me, I don’t use motion sensors in my panel (pets) so I wanted an alarm system first - the fact that it tells me open doors and windows and gives me an easy remote control capability was secondary.
sparkydave, thanks for your input here. Much appreciated.
One note is that I’m not looking to actually create an alarm system in HA – rather, I am just trying to take outputs from the alarm system and bring them in to HA. For example, I want motion detectors hooked up to the alarm system for actual alarming purposes, but I want them connected to HA for presence sensing for turning lights on/off, etc.
While the NodeMCU looks interesting, I’m wondering if the same thing can be accomplished with a RPI + Breadboard? Is there a way to connect that to MQTT and achieve the same basic thing? Or, is there a reason I should use a NodeMCU instead of a RPI?
The problem with what you mentioned is what I mentioned to sparkydave below, which is that I do want/need the ability to see those devices all the time.The only thing I really care about between HA and my alarm system is perhaps the ability to arm/disarm from the interface I’m going to set up, but even that is secondary to the device reporting that I need to have.
I keep hoping I can find something with a more direct interface just to send those signals, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So, it sounds like I need to have a contingency plan!
I had considered a similar thing and basically gave up. If you really want to do it, you basically have to tap the wires going to the alarm panel which I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do. If you do go that route, I’d look at mysensors.org - that’s a pretty easy way to take arduino based sensors and use radios/ethernet/serial to communicate the data around. There is already a plugin for hooking those sensors into HA. Obviously you’ll still have to figure out how to monitor the signals of the sensors without disrupting the alarm panel. FYI for wireless sensors, you can use a software defined radio and get the signals that way (see here).
A way you can achieve this is by installing Fibaro Universal Binary Sensors in each PIR. They will provide pass-through for your alarm but also sent the alarm and tamper signals back to Hass via Z-Wave. (z-wave controller required… such as Aeotec USB) I used them in my last house and they are good. Nice and small to fit inside the PIR housing.
From there, I will use outputs from my alarm system (via their specific output boards) to bring each sensor (or group of sensors that is relevant) into the Arduino. From there, I will program the Arduino to accept those inputs and report into HA through MQTT.
Thoughts? Will be a fair amount of work and not cheap, but I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t work?
I’m doing a similar thing with a couple of nodemcu’s. Each one of the zones will be jumpered across to the nodemcu, nodemcu will send MQTT messages to homeassistant.
I am yet to work out a way to sense if the alarm system is armed or disarmed. Worse case scenario will be to detect voltage over an led.
Every alarm panel can be programmed to send a dry contact to signal armed vs disarmed. The only question is whether you have any available outputs to send it from, and whether or not you can program it.
I searched around a bit and can’t find a schematic of the panel itself. If you can find one, feel free to post it here and I will take a look. If not, even just snap a photo of the panel and I will take a look.
Hey @RebelT, I’m just about to release a project on GitHub that you’re free to use/modify: https://github.com/marthoc/EntrHAnce. It’s written in Arduino IDE for the NodeMCU but would be adaptable to an Arduino board with more inputs easily. There’s an alpha release at the moment that I created for another user to test, and which works well, but I should have a few minutes of free time in the next few days to make an actual release. It’s a completely local solution that integrates over wifi and mqtt into your HA system. The actual release will support HA’s MQTT discovery feature, so you’ll just have to set up the NodeMCU, connect it to your broker, and then binary sensors for all your contacts will be created in HA automagically.
With the NodeMCU you have access to 7-9 inputs (still have to confirm if I can squeeze two extra inputs in), and it’s easy and cheap enough to add more boards until you get the number of inputs you need.
With your Arduino Mega idea, don’t forget that you will have to add an Ethernet shield or Esp8266 to give it network access for MQTT.
I would recommend going with a DSC panel and an envistalink. They are really affordable and very well documented in North America. The real benefit is that they are an alarm panel so it works as an alarm reliably (without an alarm service / cloud) but you can hook up 32 / 64 sensor and control 4 relays and all hook up to HA with a PI.
hey @marthocoo – I will be watching this with keen interest!
re: the Arduino Mega, I will likely go with the EtherMega option which includes the built-in ethernet interface. Unless I’m missing something, that should work for what I’m looking for.
Thanks for the heads up – excited to see the full version once it’s done!
I don’t have a ton of time to look at it right now, but Terminal blocks 3 and 4 are “PGM1” and “PGM2”. Per a quick read of the manual, PGM2 is a 12v/50mA output that can be used to trigger detectors that require power (other than a N/O or N/C contact) to reset. In your case, you can simply connect one leg of an input wire to TB4/PGM2, and the other leg to ground, and that should give you a state-change for a N/O or N/C contact, which you can then connect in to HA to signal armed/disarmed.
While I’m not 100% familiar with the terminology they use, it appears on Page 14 (edited for correct page) that you can set PGM2 to pulse, which should be based upon the arming state of the system.
I would explore those options and see what you can come up with. Without having the panel in front of me, it’s tough to know for sure, but that’s my best guess as of right now. If you can figure out the programming, grab a multimeter and see if you can get it to register a state change on arm/disarm. If you can, there you go.
I will have some time after next Monday to dig in further if you haven’t found a way to make it work.
