Is there any sort of adaptor that would replace the control box of a burglar alarm? Until a few months ago my workshop was protected by a wired burglar alarm system (Pyronix I think) but the main box died of old age. All of the sensors are wired and some need a permanent dc supply.
While I could kludge something up with IO pins on the Raspberry Pi, this must be quite a common requirement and it would seem to be a bit of re-inventing the wheel to make something if a well-researched and properly made device exists to adapt the existing sensors to a home automation system.
For scale, my existing system had 4 door/window sensors, 2 PIR motion sensors, and 1 wired smoke alarm. All of the sensors were wired back to the panel, not on a loop as that was the easy way to do it.
Have a look at Konnected.
You can either do it yourself on a ESP8266 board and connect the zones to it etc.
Or you can buy the ready made boards they do.
Thank you Steveuk, that looks like it will do what I want. I will see if I can download their manuals to find out how I want to implement it. Zigbee preferred, but wired to the Pi is also an option.
If you’re going to try Konnected it’s all connected through WiFi then you can use MQTT.
If you’re wanting ZigBee you could look at finding a ZigBee relay, or even some door contact sensors like certain fibaros have external connectors where you can wire the door contacts to.
i use cheap zigbee door sensors.
open it , put two wires on the magnetic component
sure to achieve this you can do this with wifi,zigbee-rf-z-wave or others protocols sensors too
The intention is to avoid using batteries in the system and to not have energetic RF noise - Zigbee is O.K., but WiFi is too noisy. I did find Konnected and they offer the “Konnected Alarm Panel Pro 12-Zone Smart Wired Alarm Kit” but this would be about £250 with taxes and shipping. I also found an affordable device on eBay “Home Burglar Alarm to Smart Alarm Conversion Kit” but the signal connection to the network is WiFi.
I suspect that the only practical option is to hardwire into the Raspberry Pi but as this also has the touch screen dashboard it would be a shame not to be able to relocate when and as needed.
So going off that it looks like you’re in the UK.
In that case you could do exactly what I’m doing.
I bought a Honeywell Flex 20 off eBay used a few years ago now for about £50 and that’s connected to my wired motion sensors.
That panel allows add on modules and I’ve added 3 modules so far
1.Ethernet module for internet connection.
2. RF wireless module so now I’ve added RF contacts sensors to the areas that are hard to wire to
3. And another module developed by “Selfmon” which then makes the connection between the alarm panel and my home assistant but using MQTT.
But selfmon also does a monitoring service for about £1 a month that will alert you of a intruder by text, email phone call etc.
The seller has been very helpful and was super simple to wire up my old honeywell accenta in about 15 minutes + 3 hours of HA fiddling ;-). His recommended approach is to leave the old board in there and use it to power all the 12v connections you need including the new board and also continue to use its battery.
HA setup was just using the standard konnected integration and following this guide:
Thank you gingemonster for the info that konnected is open source. I will look through the Github documents to see if modifying it for my needs is within my competence.
The device as it is is not too useful to me as it communicates through WiFi which I would rather avoid for my applications. It is just about possible that I may be able to contribute a non-WiFi implementation back to the open-source community.
Mike
EDIT: Just an update. I can’t find any indication that konnected itself is open source, only the tutorial.
Thank you gingemonster, unfortunately, I would still rather avoid WiFi and konnected, nodemcu and the ESP8266 are WiFi by nature. Part of the reason is that my home workshop is a fairly good low RF zone, but also because both the workshop are very well provisioned with wired and conduited window and door contacts and other sensors.
It is quite strange the konnected makes a product to use the existing alarm wiring but then requires a WiFi connection to the rest of the home automation system. I have seen that they have a POE version but this starts at $266.
When time allows I will further explore the options raised by Steveuk.
Did u make any progress with this? I also have a pyronix alarm. I’ve only just started using home assistant, previously using tuya.
I had linked my alarm to tuya but could only detect armed/unarmed state and alarm activation.
I did this by connecting relays with dry outputs to the panel. Full set will power one and alarm activation will power the other. I had to get an installer to set up the outputs on the panel.
I then hacked leak sensors and connected to the NO output of the relays. So when the panel is either armed or activated the relay is powered and closes the contacts. Leak sensors are then triggered and can be used to trigger automations.
You could also use contact sensors as previously suggested but I found the leak sensors less fiddly as there is a length of cable to work with. This worked well with the tuya app.
Having moved to HA it is not really working as the wifi leak sensors are not working with local tuya that I am using. Could possibly use ZigBee sensors to integrate better with HA. I have thought about using a power adaptor so I don’t need to replace batteries.
This setup is ok for automations using the armed or activated status (I used it to trigger presence simulation routines when away). It won’t tell you anything about individual sensors as konnected does but it does what I need and costs a fraction of konnected
Arming/disarming can also be done by using a relay connected to the key switch terminals on the panel.
I also would second the recommendation from gingemonster for the eBay conversion kits which are on for just under £40 for up to 6 sensors (expandable). You can now use ESPHome which is easier to set Home Assistant up than the previous tutorial listed above by gingemonster.
I’ve used these units in my home for almost 4 years without any issues, so I am getting good value.
I had the same dilemma. I wanted to “modernize” my old alarm panel and was thinking about just upgrading it to something new. But then I stumbled upon home automation while doing product research. Instead of spending over $1k on something new I spent it on a couple of wall panels and additional z-wave sensors. I’ve been bitten by Home Assistant and am now a rabid member. I already had a VMWare server so I just added the HA appliance and viola! One thing though, you really do need to use the paravirtual SCSI controller and VMXNET3 NIC or you will get console errors that build up until it crashes at random times. Add those two and rock solid. But I digress, back to the alarm dilemma. I saw the Konnected thing and was going to go for it until I saw that it was almost $300 for 16 contacts. After doing a ton more research and going down many different rabbit holes I came across a Kincony product - KC868-A16 - arduino ESP32 16 channel GPIO module – KC868-A16 -. They have mosfet and relay output versions and I saw potential. I bought one for about $32 shipped to my door. At first I was trying to augment my panel, which was going to take a bit of electronic work, but then asked myself, “Why. Why do you need the old alarm?” After a couple of days I realized I did NOT. There is NOTHING that alarm board can do that the new HA installation can’t as long as I have access to my binary sensors. It was a rip and replace using the same cabinet and the Kincony board. Being a noob with esp32 stuff it did take me a little while to figure it all out but since I’m a network engineer it was only a matter of time. 5 months in and I couldn’t have imagined what was possible. I’m so glad I didn’t get another traditional type of alarm system.
Please note that Konnected product and the use of relays connected to PIR/contact sensors using existing wiring defeats the alarm tamper loop protection for open and short circuits. Ie you cables can cut without sounding the alarm.
I strongly believe that an alarm system should be a separate purpose designed commercial box that has the usual sophisticated functionality. Choose one that can be interfaced with HA to (serial, usb, Ethernet) to add the extra functionality you require. It’s not an expensive option for the security it offers and it will always work even should HA be down.
Also be aware that Konnected alarm products (I just checked the website) seem to have no optical isolation and almost no protection circuitry. This should instantly disqualify them from use.
Also, WiFi is trivially easy to defeat (if you use one of their WiFi only boards) and criminals absolutely know this because there are under $10 products available to conduct various WiFi attacks (ie. deauth).
