Bwalarm (akasma74 edition)

AhmadK · July 10, 2019, 10:28am

I can reproduce it and need to think if it’s a bug or a feature…
Thanks for reporting that anyway

Leon_Pladdet · July 10, 2019, 1:51pm

Hello, i just installed the BWalarm by the community tab. but i can’t open the alarm tab from the menu i get the error:
“Unable to load custom panel from https://HOMEASSISTANT.duckdns.org/api/panel_custom/alarm”

AhmadK · July 10, 2019, 2:13pm

I suspect that you installed NOT the latest version as mine is at
http://hassio.local:8123/alarm

Leon_Pladdet · July 10, 2019, 4:06pm

i get it from the community store in my hass

sparkydave · July 11, 2019, 2:19am

Hi all,

I just got my new hard-wired commercial alarm system communicating with my HA MQTT server and can now see all data coming from the panel in MQTT Lens. I’m using this interface.

What I don’t know how to do is integrate that data with this HA alarm system. Can anyone please help me out? My hope is to get the two systems acting as one. ie: if I arm the commercial system, it arms the HA one, and vice versa.

The settings section of this HA alarm has settings for MQTT integration but it appears that it is expecting straight topics rather than a JSON string. I tried putting in the JSON but the component failed to start.

I am also hoping that the hard-wired sensors can become entities within HA. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks

AhmadK · July 11, 2019, 6:28am

It should not be difficult and requires 2 automations: one reacts to bwalarm changing state to armed_xxx and sends mqtt message to set your commercial alarm, and the other does the same the other way round.

In settings you can set a TOPIC. Then you can send JSON messages to this topic. Currently only code attribute supported.

Here we need more details.

sparkydave · July 11, 2019, 6:31am

My hard-wired (commercial) alaram system is now reporting all state changes via MQTT. So if I walk in front of a PIR for example, that is reported via MQTT. I’m hoping (and I think it’s fairly possible) that I can include that data as new entities in HA.

AhmadK · July 11, 2019, 6:32am

Then please open a new issue on GitHub.
Make sure to include all necessary details to deal with it.

AhmadK · July 11, 2019, 6:34am

Off the top of my head yes, just create a MQTT binary/template sensor and then use it everywhere in HA, including this integration.

tom_l · July 11, 2019, 7:50am

Here’s an example mqtt binary sensor for one of my PIRs:

- platform: mqtt
  state_topic: "gpio_bridge_1/input/pir_wkshop"
  name: "pir_workshop"
  payload_on: 'ON'
  payload_off: 'OFF'
  qos: 0
  device_class: motion

AhmadK · July 11, 2019, 12:01pm

A new release v1.10.1 is available.

It fixes this issue and shortens the integration’s name in HACS.

Patrul · July 11, 2019, 8:06pm

Great job
Thanks!

sparkydave · July 13, 2019, 4:02am

Do you know of a way that I can test the mqtt code / setup? I tried to include a simple mqtt sensor to grab the alarm system status but it caused the entire mqtt platform to fail to load at HA startup.

AllI had was:

sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: Paradox Alarm Status
    state_topic: "paradoxdCTL/status"

Trying things in the template dev tool doesn’t seem to do anything

tom_l · July 13, 2019, 4:15am

The mqttfx client is good for setting up buttons to publish to topics but I prefer MQTT-Explorer for checking topics on an mqtt server.

sparkydave · July 13, 2019, 5:11am

Thanks. I’ll give those a try. One thing that I am finding hard to work out is the translation from the JSON that my alarm system is giving out to state topics / attributes for HA. I haven’t found anything on this forum to get me heading in the right direction… there are threads similar but I couldn’t get my version to work.

tom_l · July 13, 2019, 5:20am

Might be worth starting your own topic with some json examples and what you want from them.

AhmadK · July 13, 2019, 7:12am

log output? by the way, you need binary_sensor, not sensor for PIRs (see an example).

template editor is useful for templates. you haven’t got one yet here as I can see, that’s why it does not anything

And tom is right, post your alarm’s JSON here. There are many examples that give you the idea, like this one.

sparkydave · July 13, 2019, 7:22am

I know I need binary_sensor for the PIR’s but I was going with what I hoped was the easiest, being the alarm panel status, which is either: armed, away, stay or disarmed…hence using sensor:

I’m away from home for a while and have been unsuccessful in viewing the MQTT broker remotely so will have to wait until Friday to get the MQTT JSON data from the alarm panel.

I did read that doc page yesterday but couldn’t figure out how my data relates to the example.

AhmadK · July 13, 2019, 7:47pm

No, you need to reflect your PIR’s status

As soon as you post your JSON, we’ll sort that out

sparkydave · July 13, 2019, 9:40pm

This is only true for including the PIR’s into HA, but as I mentioned previsouly I also want to make the commercial alarm system and the HA alarm system act as one, which means making them follow each others status. ie: if I use one of my wireless remote controls to arm the commercial alarm system, I want the HA alarm to also arm. This can only be done by using the paradoxdCTL/status MQTT topic so that HA knows the current state of the commercial alarm. Likewise if I arm the HA alarm system I will then also need to use the paradoxdCTL/in topic for HA to send a MQTT command to the Paradox alarm to make it arm (to copy the state of the HA alarm)

I’ll post the JSON data when I get back home later this week.