I am trying to use a Dakota alert driveway alarm. The alarm sends a signal to a receiver that is capable out outputting a 12v DC signal. From the website:
“Will give relay and/or 12 VDC output when a signal is received. The two Form “C” relays can be connected to an alarm control or home automation panel (not included) to act as a hard wired zone for the panel. The 12 VDC output can be used to power a bell, siren, strobe or any other 12 VDC device (not included). The output duration can be set for either 1, 5, 15 seconds or 5 minutes.”
How do I integrate this so that Home Assistant can trigger an action based on the alarm going off?
Depends upon which devices you currently have in HA, or/and if your prepared to buy/make some
But also i.e Siren , if someone comes through my driveway, it activates a Siren( So i hear if someones coming), the Siren is close to outdoor Cam(with sounds trigger), which starts to “record” (only on loooud! sounds) (currently disabled ), not bullet proof as a thunder-strike also can triggered the “recording” , which can trigger whatever. (the Cams “State” can trigger what ever)
You can “make a device” your self, i.e a “zigbee light-sensor” a small gimmick your can build in a small box, together with a 12V light bulb, the Dakota turns on the 12V light bulb and triggers the Light-Sensor, which triggers whatever
Simplest would be to switch a 12V relay and to connect the relay to an ESP with ESPHome on it. A simple GPIO input pin that will then give you a sensor in HA.
I don’t have much experience with electronics / component building. However, I figured it could be relatively easy? I started goggleing ESP / ESPHome. Any pointers on good resources to learn?
It looks relatively cheap to build these things, I just got to figure out how to do it.
Yeah, an ESP32 with ESPHome will work great. Maybe even something very small like a D1. You don’t need much in this case.
I’m a bit short on time, so I’ll just give a description.
Find a 12V relay (there are many options). You want to drive the relay from your source. You should be able to find some diagrams. The important thing is: A relay isolates the two sides, so there’s no power flowing. This is important, since the ESP can’t work with 12V.
That also means you need something to power the ESP. Just find a buck converter that steps the voltage down to 5V or 3.3V if you want to use a 12V power source (ESP boards often have a 5V USB connector, but the chip itself is 3.3V, so you can power it in two ways).
Right, back to the relay. Relays can work in two modes: It has NC (normally closed) and NO (normally open) pins. So, NC would mean that when the relay is not on, the circuit on that side will be closed. Ditto for NO.
Whatever you choose, you need to connect either the NC or NO pin and the common pin to the ESP. NC or NO will go to a GPIO (general purpose input/output) pin. Common will connect to ground.
Let’s just pick NO. You need to pick a pin on the ESP with an internal pull-up resistor or add an external one of 10kΩ (if you pick NC you’ll need to have a pull-down resistor). When the relay’s output circuit is open, you’ll get what we call a floating pin that will be neither high or low (or jittering) if you don’t have the pull-up resistor. In ESPHome you’ll configure this and that it’s a binary sensor and you’ll be done.
PS: Just for completeness’ sake and for other readers: There are other options to, such as using an optocoupler (photodiodes) or a transistor circuit.
Was looking for similar solutions. I thought about using a Shelly i4 module, connecting the output relay of the Dakota receiver to the input of the Shelly. Do you think that would work?
To do what? Trigger the door to open or close? The i4 is just a way to make wireless buttons. It only has inputs — and no relays. A Shelly 1 would work though, as it has a relay, so it can actuate.
I was just after something that would send me a notification when someone comes down our drive. No gates or anything to control as such, just to send a message to my phone