Am new to these community, trying figure out where to start typing topic.
Anyway i bought house last year, starting installing devices with using controller by Home Assistant - am ongoing learning with home assistant.
Looking for installing alarms device… what do i need to have… i preferred all sensors wired and link up all ports to esp board to communication with HA.
Found one for outside sirens - “ESP Security ECSPEXSW Smart Alarm External Siren Wired” from websites… is that any good? As noticed ESP… wondering if that’s HA friendly?
No need. If you have anything from Yolink, the Yolink integration with Home Assistant would work. Then go to Virtualarm and for $9 per month you can have a Virtualarm account that connects to the Yolink devices you prefer - via your Yolink account.
Yolink is the only integration with Home Assistant that I know of that can also end up integrating with a 24/7 call center service.
With Yolink devices, the devices do not speak to home assistant. The devices talk to a Yolink hub in your home. This is the way it works - the Yolink hub does not talk to home assistant either.
Example:
Yolink Motion Sensor in your home → Yolink hub in your home → Yolink servers on the internet → Home Assistant (via Yolink integration software) - whatever automation/code you like.
There are too many points of failure in the above scenario.
So, for anything that does not require the 24/7 monitoring, I am switching over from Yolink to Shelly and other such devices that can talk directly to HA for better responsiveness and reliability.
So in a few rooms I have a Yolink motion sensor and also a “Shelly Motion 2” motion sensor which talks directly to HA. In comparing performance, the Shelly motion sensor typically only shows in HA as detecting motion about 1/2 or 1 second before the Yolink motion sensor. That is only when everything is running perfectly however with the internet connection, etc. sometimes however it’s 5 or 10 seconds slower. That’s not really acceptable when you need to flap your arms annoyingly in a dark room for the lights to go on, but might be acceptable for an alarm system as long as the authorities are notified.
Let me know if you can find any other integration that offers a 24/7 monitoring. I actually asked the head Virtualarm sales rep to reach out to Shelly but never heard back…
I just heard a Yolink hub supposedly is coming which also offers local control… But no details yet -