Has anyone tried connecting with Alexa and then connecting Alexa with Nabu Casa (if you have the subscription?) this may be a temporary work around
I have it connected to the Alexa Skill, but there’s not much you can do with it other than have it schedule a test weekly (which, to be fair, is the main automation I wanted), and tell Alexa to silence the alarm. I can’t see a way to use the alarm as a trigger and the individual alarms seem to be exposed to Alexa as burglar alarms as the options are to Arm Home or Arm Away. I don’t think you can directly expose an Alexa device to Nabu Casa (maybe someone can correct me), other than creating an input boolean in HASS, exposing that to Alexa and then having an Alexa routine to switch the input boolean on/off, which I do for other devices, but I can’t see how that would help here, given the basic options available.
and I guess either the FireAngel app or Alexa will notify you if there is a smoke/heat/co event? so will there be much use in a Home Assistant automation other than to action other devices?
Yes, the FireAngel app notifies you of an event and sends an email. It would be useful to have greater integration into Home Assistant, as you could switch on the lights, unlock the door etc to make exiting the house quicker/safer/easier, but the core of what you need (IMO) is catered for by the FireAngel app and Alexa. It might be possible to use the Home Assistant IMAP Email Content integration to create sensors for the different events from the emails it sends, but I haven’t had any success in using this (for other things either) yet. The documentation for this integration is a little lacking/unclear and I need to spend more time getting my head around how you use this integration.
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Who provides your email? Is it Gmail? I have just managed to do this with the IMAP Email Content integration that you mentioned
This is the config I used
sensor:
- platform: imap_email_content
name: IMAP Email
server: imap.gmail.com
port: 993
username:
password:
senders:
- [email protected]
template:
sensor:
- name: FireAngel Alarms
state: >
{{ state_attr('sensor.imap_email','body')
|regex_findall_index(">(.*) has been detected") }}
Hope this helps!
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So I was in communication with FireAngel at this time. I sent some test results to them which were not good at all. I received direct feedback at the time that this downtime was a result of improvements following my complaint.
The complaint I made to their tech department, related to a test I carried out, where I could get the gateway to say “all devices are OK / Online”, even as though I’d bagged up all my alarms and removed them from the property.
After being bitterly disappointed with the gateway (and not minding if I destroyed it), I attached it to a debugger, to see exactly what it was doing. With the mindset of intercepting its comms to create a local HA integration.
I could see all the JSON state changes being sent to AWS. But in the end I went a different route (I will post the details in this thread). But I can also attach a debug log of the gateway communicating with AWS, in case anyone wants to take a look.
However, my recommendation is not to buy the gateway. It is a very unreliable piece of kit. There are better ways to get the WiSafe2 feed into HA.
My gateway has been offline for almost a year, and the App still reports 1 device as ‘online’.
It also states "Monitoring the risk to your home in real time using complex algorithms… Everything is OK”.
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Hi. I’m no HA expert. But I would like to share here my experience of integrating WiSafe2 alarms with HA. For any who are interested…
Like some others, I have expired Nest Protects, which I wanted to replace with a cheaper alternative, but I also wanted to realise a HA integration.
I initially purchased the FireAngel Gateway, but found it to be a dreadfully unreliable piece of kit (remove all the alarms at once, and it won’t notice)!
I also observed that the gateway would not do anything if it couldn’t reach it’s AWS end-point. i.e. It wouldn’t work to snoop the alarms locally. It would only work to snoop what was being uploaded to AWS.
So in the end, the approach I took was to build my own WiSafe2 gateway.
It means all the coms is local, the alarms are unmodified, and I can listen in / talk back to them.
With this, I am able to see states, test and silence the alarms from within HA, I receive alert notifications on my phone and my google homes speak out which alarm was triggered.
I’m absolutely sure that my HA automations can be improved by the community, as I’m not experienced in creating them. So if this is your area, feel free to help improve them.
RE: My gateway…
The WiSafe2 protocol uses an 868MHz radio. The communication is encrypted and the specification is not documented for the public.
However, the radio module communicates with the alarm via SPI. So I took a radio as a donor and built my own gateway
(if you want to do this, you can get a cheap radio from an old, expired alarm, from a strobe (really cheap on ebay) or by buying the radio as a standalone module).
With the radio on the bench, I used PulseView to decode all that I could reverse-engineer. I was able to document:
Receive:
- Test Button (and result good/bad)
- Fire Emergency
- CO Emergency
- On/Off Base State
- Low Battery State
- Device ID
- Model ID
Transmit:
- Check Radio Pairing Status
- Enter Radio Pairing Mode
- Silence Alarms
My gateway uses an Arduino Nano, and connects to HA via USB.
I’ll share the PCB, Arduino Code, HA automations, etc shortly.
I’m new to the HA forums, so please bear-with me.
I’ll also share my effort at reverse-engineering the WiSafe2 communication, for anyone looking to develop this further.
4 Likes
Hi,
Here’s everything I’ve built, in case you want to do this yourself.
Please let me know if I should share this somewhere else. As I say, I’m new to posting in the HA forums.
Here’s what it does:
HA Sensors (for each alarm)
- Battery state
- On/Off Base state
- Event (test / emergency / type(smoke/heat/co))
HA Sensors (for the gateway)
- Heartbeat (confirmation the radio is still online)
- Messages (responses to radio pairing, etc)
HA buttons:
- Check pairing (check gateway radio pairing status)
- Initiate pairing (start pairing, if it is not already paired)
- Test CO event
- Test Fire event
- Silence alarms… takes a moment for the message to propagate around all the alarms, but works
Mobile (HA companion app):
- Critical alerts (takes phone off silent)
- Messages state the origin and cause
Google TTY:
- Speaks the alert, origin and cause
I’ll write a proper build guide at some point, if there’s any interest. But in the meantime, this is everything you should need…
All files, and more are here: GitHub Link
RE: The PCB:
The level sensors are just the usual bi-directional 3.3/5v type from ebay.
There is a jumper which toggles the driver mode.
- For normal operation with HA, the jumper should be on.
- If you want to receive raw wi-safe2 hex data from the alarm network, for the purpose of further development, then remove the jumper and connect the gateway to a serial debugger.
I’ve been using this setup myself for almost a year, and for what I want, it works really well.
One limitation, is that the alarms only send things like battery state when they need to. So if you restart home-assistant, the state will revert to ‘unknown’, until you test the alarm, or unless the battery really is low.
I’m sure sensor states can be retained easily enough if you are familiar with HA configuration files, and if that’s how you want it to work
Here’s the files to build a gateway:
And here’s the HA yaml:
7 Likes
Well done.
Not sure I’d attempt it without a detailed build guide myself, but looks great.
This is totally awesome @chopwood. Thank you so much for sharing. I’m yet to read through this and make sense of it…
My first thought is that I could potentially re-fashion my RFLink Gateway for this purpose (https://www.rflink.nl/)… I no longer use it for anything else.
Anyway, need to understand what you did first… I will do that next!
I will share some progress once I have some!
Thanks again. You are a genius! 
Thanks for the link. Looks like a nice radio. I only had the sonoff bridge, which is 433MHz only.
If you have an 868MHz version, maybe this will help you.
Let us know how you get on 
Project has been migrated here
ReadMe this should have all the detail needed to build a WiSafe-to-HomeAssistant Bridge yourself.
Cheers.
3 Likes
This looks amazing. Thank you for taking the time to document and share it. I just need to try and get my head round it now and find some time to try building this.
Would it need much modification to work with an ESP32 with ethernet port rather than plugged into Home Assistant via USB? This would allow it to be placed independently anywhere there is a network port available.
The deciding factor for me to use the Nano was the requirement to use SPI in slave mode.
Typically, the Arduino would be the SPI master (which is better documented online).
But in this project, the radio is already defined as the master, so the Arduino must be used in slave mode (with an interrupt line to get the attention of the radio when we want to send some data to it).
I didn’t have much luck getting it working with an ESP8266. But a quick google suggests that the ESP32 could work.
Plus, the ESP32 is 3.3v native. So it wouldn’t need the level-shifters buffering the lines to the radio.
I guess it would also need the sensors re-thinking. i.e. switching to a TCP socket sensor in HA, instead of the USB-TTY.
I’ll have a look, but won’t make any promises.
Especially with the working Nano sketch shared, which opens up the floor up for anyone to port it.
Using a donor alarm like in the DIY guide provided seems to be the best approach. I was looking into the FireAngel Network monitor that is only sold in mainland Europe(?) And this gives no extra information on the 868MHz encryption. This guide was only available in German which I have run through Google Translate to find the following
- The test button of one of the network components must be pressed within these five seconds
- When the Network Monitor is successfully added to the network, the application flashes the red LED five times and then sends the network list to the PC where the Component Controls area displays “Active Components” or “Missing Components” in the relevant display areas will.
The German version of the instructions are here: https://www.eps-vertrieb.de/downloads/file/id/a32ecd86750ababfc823ce26874449b2
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Thank you @chopwood for sharing this!
I managed to get a donor device (W2-SVP-630L) locally off Facebook Marketplace for £5
I have ordered the PCBs (x5) which should come in a couple of weeks.
I am looking forward to linking this up with SMS via an old 3g modem!
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Thx for the research!! Nice. Much better then the gateway.
This week had I receive the PCB and solder the components.
For me it’s only working with de battery installed, not without the battery (radio is off)
So I have made a connection between 3V3 output of the nano to the + of the removed battery.
Thx for your work.
Fokko
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Hmm… I have a problem. first I had made the print, and was happy to see the red led of the radio.
Today time to copy the code to HA and first start-up.
But the sensor.fireangel_radio_heartbeat: Offline!.
sensor.fireangeldata say: … INIT FAIL - CHECK RADIO!
I have checked with my 2 radios(with accu and 3V3). The last option I had, did I try my working radio from my Alarm control unit (without battery) and had the same problem.
Then I check my in Arduino with the serial monitor and have the same INIT FAIL -…
Do you have any suggestions or tips??
Thx
Fokko
Hi Fokko,
Thanks for sharing your experience RE: the radio which didn’t power up.
When I developed this, I had a black and red radio which both worked. But there could be more variations out there…
I will make some additional tests for you soon, using the gateway with the black, battery powered type of radio.
Seems like I will need to add the 3.3v bridging mod to the guide.
In the meantime…
From what you describe, I would have thought your workaround should be good.
I compared a radio from a strobe (red), with a radio from the alarm (black).
There are some component differences depending whether it’s battery powered or not.
Black board = From Alarm (battery powered)
Red board = From Strobe (mains powered)
Differences:
- 100kΩ on the black board. 0Ω on the red board.
- Present on the black board. Omitted from the red board
- Omitted on the black board. Present on the red board (0Ω).
However, essentially, with the battery removed, this difference is worked around by bridging 3.3v supply to the radio’s battery +v to power it up, which you have found.
By default, the Arduino code gives the radio up to 120 attempts to initialise:
line 20:
int maxInitAttempts = 120;
With a 1 second delay between each attempt:
line 92
delay(1000);
In that time, we’re waiting for the radio to return HEX 46 7E
You could try increasing the delay, to give the radio a bigger break between repeated attempts.
Regards,
Chris