Hi, I have A DSC Alarm system and I would like to have all my wire sensor in Home Assistant
I did some research and I find out that home assistant support 2 integration ( Alarmdecoder and Envisalink )
what should I know about it ? is there one better than the other ? What should I buy ? etc etc…
Thanks
Instead of paying more than a $100 dolars, you can interface it for about $10 dollars with an esp8266 and esphome or mqtt . Here’s my github page with details. All code included.
Wow cool thanks ! I would really like to implement this instead of having to pay more than 100$ but I read your Git and I’m too lost …
I will check it to see if I can figure out but I never work with esp8266… I have a lot of Arduino pro mini 3.3V and 8 MHz but is it powerful enough ?
I think I have a better one some where …
Or may be I could bought this :
how do you integrate this “custom” thing into Home Assistant ?
Do I need to setup something specific for the wifi and esphome ? or everything is in your git ?
Thanks
Most is in the git except for the esphome details. You might want to read about ESPHome first.
If you just want to use MQTT, you can use the original source project and use the homeassistant-mqtt ino from the examples directory. This will work with arduino’s
Ok thank you I will check that … call you make me a little list of what I need to buy ( Arduino, Board, resistor etc… )
Thank you
A scholar and a true gentleman! Thank you! 
No offence, and I understand why you ask, but you probably didn’t get a response, because the forum users are not really paid to provide support. I suggest the ESP units personally. You can get nice and cheap ones with Wifi already built in. There are TONS of documentation online on them as well. If you are not sure how to use GIT or code, then you have a steep learning curve ahead. In that case I would suggest rather saving and purchasing the unit from the manufacturer. Unless you have the time and energy to learn, and that can really pay off in the long run, so that would have been my way 5 years ago but not anymore.
Good luck!! Hope you come right
You can just buy one of these:
A couple of years ago the price was more than $100 but now they are cheaper and will ease you the soldering and wiring hurdle.
You can use the build in firmware or you can flash it with dscKeybusInterface firmaware recommended by Dilbert66. Even you can flash it with any firmware you write.
@Dilbert66 - Thank you for sharing your work! I already have an envisalink3 board and am using the built in envisalink integration. I was wondering whether there were any benefits in adopting your solution over what I already have. I believe HA talks directly to the envisalink board so both solutions are local. I only use the integration to pull in the sensors for use in HA.
aruffeel, in addition to being very inexpensive and fully opensource, my project adds full virtual keypad support, virtual zone expanders, etc. It all depends on what type of control you want of your panel. For most users, the envisalink is more than enough. My solution would most likely appeal more to someone who doesnt want to spend over 100 or more dollars for a closed source board and is more of a diy person.
Thanks @Dilbert66 for this project. Managed to relatively easily get alarm and sensor status into HA, and a couple of scripts to Arm/Disarm etc. A bit stuck on the Virtual keyboard? No idea where to start. Is it just a case of knowing more than I do about creating dashboards? Or is there someone who has done it befor that can give guidance ?
You need to add a resource to your dashboard that points to the js file. Then add a manual card with the yaml config for the card to the dashboard that uses this resource.
Since I had come up on this and decided to use the BRDSC01 v4 - Wanted to give an update.
#1 holy crap I have to say at least the one I got was POS. Seriously - Right now if they dont refund my money I’m out $100. Yes $100 - because even though it was $65 to buy it, somehow this 4 oz thing cost $30 to ship. confusing because I’ve price the cost to send it back to them and it’s no where near that much, but hey, hopefully they let me send it back anyway.
#2 - Not well made. My system was providing 13.5V - which is normally fine for a 12V device. Certainly usually better to have more than less. But no - after a few minutes of being on this thing would start doing a low pitched whine and behaved erratically - network to configure it would say up maybe 1-2 then disappear. After a good week of working on it and multiple emails with their support, where I finally just hooked up a bank of batteries to give it 12V - it “kinda” worked. But not really.
Because it connected…but would never send data. This sent down another rabbit hole only to discover through pages and pages of reading on their site that hidden in there they mention “oh we configure these for remote management automatically, and with that enabled it will NOT send to a mqtt broker any status updates if it’s not “secure” and using TLS 1.2”. Now on the configure page it clearly lets you mark it’s not secure…and use port 1083…but yeah…it will register the configs for your system and create entities…but never get a status update because those other settings are hidden! Yep…totally hidden. Despite their documentation of it being on the config screen to turn off the remote management…it’s not there on their latest firmware.
I was about to try to figure out how to flash it to an older firmware to see if that would help At this point I’d probably spent 30-40 hours tinkering with this stupid thing. I figure they owe me my hourly rate - Which is $55 an hour. I’m not cheap.
However, today hooking it to battery and nothing. Reconnected…grabbed new batteries…tested the voltage…should be coming on. But nothing. No lights. Nada.
Btw - I’m certainly not an expert in this stuff - but I am an IT specialist with the air force for over 20 years. I’m mostly a virtualizaton/server guy…but I can certainly hold my own on other things. This had to be the worst experience I have had with a smart device yet, and I have alot of things going on. By comparison btw - the cheap Athom garge door ESP units - fabulous. worked perfectly and never had an issue.
So now I’m waiting to try to get them to let me return it. I get that companies just have some bad units. But the poor quality of the device was also matched by it’s poor firmware and documentation.
Also - their site documentation for manual configuration of sensors is horribly out of date and doesnt work anymore Dont follow it if you try one.
Basically the same experience here with the Coiaca BRDSC01 v4 as above, it’s still on sale, don’t buy it.
The documentation doesn’t help you,
the board gets extremely hot with the DSC system it’s supposed to be designed for,
needs tedious manual setup in home assistant, discovery is not working at all,
Doesn’t stay connected to MQTT for more than a few days, regardless of the distance to your AP,
The official firmware update broke the device completely.
Don’t buy, if you come across this thread, unfortunately I found this too late.
Hi @Dilbert66, I have been trying to get your DSC Integration setup, but I’m battling with the Custom Alarm Panel Card setup. HA has changed a whole lot of things making things not quite fit your explanation:
“To configure the card, just place the main script alarm-keypad-card.js and associated *.mp3 sound files into the /config/www directory of your homeassistant installation and add a new resource in your lovelace configuration pointing to /local/alarm-keypad-card.js?id=1. You can then configure the card as shown below.” 1st of all i didnt have the www folder, so I created it. but I still cant figure out how to add a new resource to my lovelace configuration. Please could you point me in the right direction with the setup for the new versions of HA?
@Dilbert66, finally managed to get it right, however the dashboard setup isn’t working, I keep getting this error “ * Custom element not found: alarm-keypad-card”
I have everything setup the way it’s explained in your GitHub readme:
I’ve updated the documentation to reflect some of the changes. As to the issue of HA not seeing the alarm panel card, you need to refresh your web page either by pressing F5 or closing the browser and re-opening to force it to load the web app.
@Dilbert66 i have added the repository as per your update step 1, after that i rebooted HA, closed my browser, Cleared the cache and I’m still getting the custom element not found error.
I have done a search on adding the code to the yaml file. But for the life of me I can’t find where to add it, everything I found says I need to stop the GUI before making the change, but I have a feeling I’m looking too far into it.
Perhaps, you did not create the www directory in the right location. It goes under the same directory where your HA configuration.yaml sits. You don’t create the “config” part, that already exists. Only the “www”. You do not need to restart ha or anything else. Only the browser or the page where the keypad element is supposed to show up on. Usually an F5 refresh will take care of that.
I thought the www was a folder that was automatically there, so when adding the repository I added it as /local/config/www/alarm-keypad-card.js?id=1. After your reaponse I realized that I created as I was supposed to, and updated the repository to your url and now I was able to get the dashboard to work. I’m getting the resistors today then will connect my esp8266 to the panel, then I will test and let you know.
Thank you so much for your guidance!
Really appreciate it!
