Hey digiblur. Thank you for your contribution to getting this working for us. I’m actually in the middle of implementing the motions that are bypassed into automation. I previously used DSC with Envisalink but I moved and Honeywell appeared to be a better fit. I still have an Envisalink, however, I’ve had terrible luck getting it to play nice with Home Assistant so I switched to AlarmDecoder and it’s been 100% stable.
I’d like to get the bypassed motions to report status in HA but I am missing something as I configured the relayaddr and relaychan but I know there’s more to it. Can you let me know what I’m missing? I’ve searched the Alarm Decoder documentation but it’s kind of vague with no solid examples.
I too struggled with this issue for quite some time and had many failures on getting it working until I started tearing into the alarmdecoder python library and realized the answer was right there. I found a VERY old archived post about the bypassed zone monitoring (specifically talking about the Vista 20P panel…there might be others).
Since the device simply sits on the keypad bus and listens for events, as you know the panel tries to be smart and not send out the tripped sensors such as motion at night when in armed home mode. This also presents a problem if you want to read the binary output of the delayed door for instant lighting when disarming the system from armed away mode. I heard from one EVL user that they don’t have this issue on their 20P but I don’t think he knew what I was talking about as I also found the issue in their threads with no solution. Fortunately Alarmdecoder has an solution!!
First you have to configure your Alarmdecoder to emulate a relay board. In reality these are boards installed in the home to trigger different things based on alarm events. The cool thing is they attach to the same keypad bus. So there’s the workaround. If you configure the panel to send a close relay command when the motion sensor is triggered then send an open relay command when the motion is not triggered you can see these commands on they keypad bus no matter what state the alarm panel is in. I only have two bypassed sensors (delayed door and motion) that I programmed in.
What you need to do is program the panel to send these codes to this emulated relay board. I had to dig up some programming manuals and walk through the programming. It’s not too hard but I just took my time and went through things. Here’s one thread with some instructions… when I get home later I’ll see if I can find the PDFs I used.
Fantastic! It took a little reading on that article but I got everything working without a hitch. The hardest part was hitting the serial interface on the ad2usb and turning on the relay. The rest was just programming my panel for the relays.
I had a weird issue where the panel didn’t see the relay and was beeping error codes but I discovered that’s because you must reboot it.
Any future users that want to read events off a zone that’s bypassed while in an armed state can follow those instructions. Remember to setup the ad2usb or ad2pi for relay expander emulation first! Make sure to also follow the zone reset procedure to turn off the tripped zones. once you do all this set your HA alarmdecoder component using the relayaddr and relaychan variables on your zone.(use addr 12 and whatever relay chan you’d like just make sure it’s 1-4 per emulated relay board so a max number of 16 if you enabled all 4 boards.)
Thanks for the follow up! You beat me to the programming instructions PDF! Great job!
One thing to be aware of, if you reboot the Alarmdecoder module (I have the Raspberry Pi hat version) the alarm will freak out since it doesn’t get a response from the relay board. But once the AD is back up you can just do an arm and disarm and I think a second disarm? Can’t remember, whichever will clear the trouble codes. Then it will be all back and working.
Enjoy! The road was definitely a long for me and I’ve been enjoying the motion activation from the unit along with instantly lighting when the door opens. Have some conditions based on if we are home and its at late enough in the day on both of those and based on the alarm state as well.
If this occurs you need to verify Alarm Decoder is configured for relay emulation and also online and then arm and disarm the system to clear it.
In my case I have an ad2usb which gets power directly off the panel. I imagine if you have an ad2pi or an ad2pi hat that you’re not running off the panel power it can create a problem or during a reboot. I almost connected my ad2usb directly to the power brick(bypassing the panel battery) so it wouldn’t waste power during an outage. Now I will be sure NOT to do that.
You might laugh but when I did my programming I found it so much easier to just watch the telnet session opened on port 10000 to the Pi and watched the screen. I have one of those simple keypads that makes it hard to see things like words/letters. Even if I had a full alpha keypad I’d still use the telnet display for its larger history and easy reading.
