Home Security Ideas

Hardware
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Good afternoon all, I need some advice on what direction to go with my home security system. As of now, I have none. As of soon, I want one. I guess I ran out of easy projects…

Anyway, as I started to research what I need, it became very clear that I have no idea what I’m doing. So of course I want to learn! I’m not looking to go crazy or anything. I am thinking of simply adding some battery powered window/door sensors and maybe a few motion sensors. I’ve come across the GD-WDS07 on the forums (I love automating battery notifications) and before I went and ordered them I figured I would throw this post up here to see if anyone has good/bad/better ideas for me. My main question is…do I need a hub to connect these sensors? I’m really trying to avoid having a ton of hubs, which was my main objective to begin with. I do have a Wink hub that I’m in the process of migrating away from (to a ConBee/Deconz setup). I also have an MQTT docker running if I need to use that for integration I could. I’m really open to anything, just don’t know where to start.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’d love to hear any input if you have anything to share…

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Main thing you will need for these is something to receive the data from them. A Sonoff RF Bridge will do the trick just fine, or you could just make your own using an RF receiver (an transmitter if you so desire) and an ESP8266. I use these door sensors and they work great. Keep in mind thought that they do NOT report their condition. They only report on a change (door was opened, door was closed). They will not allow you to check for the current position of the door so it is possible that they can be wrong occasionally. I am seriously considering switching mine out for zigbee or the wyze sensors

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Very good to know! Thanks. I think I might follow your lead. I think I would like the option of being able to see in real time where the door/window is. I read something about the Sonoff RF bridge only being able to support 4 devices. I’ll need about 9, so does that mean that I need 3 bridges or is there a firmware update that will allow me to handle that many on 1 bridge?

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Wyze looks like a great option for what I’m looking to do. I’m going to dig into that for a bit! Great advice!

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If you are anyway switching to ConBee/Deconz, I can highly recommend the Xiaomi Door/Window sensors, used them for 2 years now without any issues and they are extremly cheap, I got 15 sensors in a sale for less than 100 bucks!

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I started my quest 2 years ago and it’s still work in progress.
Some thoughts:

  1. It might be reasonable to have a separate HA instance to run ONLY your home security system: you don’t want to disturb it if an update goes wrong or you have to reboot it.
  2. Think about flexibility - if you go any proprietary way, it might limit choice of sensors/devices. On the other hand, cheap 433 MHz devices are not always great…
  3. It’s usually enough to have some PIRs and door sensors, but you need to take into account how large is the area you need to cover as it will dictate how many receivers you heed to have and where.
  4. Think about sirens/lights - how to connect them to the main unit.
  5. Power supply/UPS for the whole system (including MQTT server)
  6. If it’s HA-powered, consider having SSD instead of SD card.
  7. If you can, choose wired connections over wireless to increase both reliability and responsiveness. It’s hard, I know :wink:

I run a bunch of Sonoff PIR sensors and a couple of GD-WDS07, 2 RF bridges: Sonoff RF Bridge and Wemos D1 mini, both flashed with OMG. Don’t think it makes a lot of sense to buy the Sonoff one as one can build it cheaper and have more flexible solution. Have 2 sirens - one wired to RPi’s GPIO running Hass.io, other is plugged into Sonoff S26. All configured under this custom alarm, controlled via phone/tablet running WallPanel for Android.

Hope it helps.

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What sirens do you use?

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rubbish chinese ones - something like this :wink:
they are dirt cheap and pretty loud for one room/open space/floor BUT tend to die if you run them constantly for say, a couple of minutes (have 1 dead already) so I wrote a script that makes short pauses to let it "rest’.

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Thanks all. I decided to keep it simple and easy. I just threw some Wyze contact sensors on each of my first floor windows and put a few Wyze motion detectors and Wyze cameras on my entry doors. I think I’m going to write some automatons to flash the lights when the contacts are tripped during overnight hours or when we are all away. All in all it cost me about $120 so it was very reasonable (and fun to set up!).

Now I’m thinking about triggering my Echo Dots to act as my siren. You know what they say about idle hands…

Appreciate everyones input.