Hi Mario, thanks for your reply! And welcome to the home assistant forums! I’d be very interested to hear more about your setup with Shelly relays. Are you able to monitor the motion sensors as well as control the alarm system?
Hi Nathan, unfortunately with the way I have it setup I am only able to arm/disarm and receive and alert when the alarm has been triggered.
The Shelly 1 relay has both and output which is used to arm and disarm the alarm via the keyswitch input on the panel and I’m using the armed zone to inputs function and wiring an output from the panel to the input of the Shelly.
It’s a bit of a basic setup but that’s the only way it will work at the current time.
Ill get a schematic drawn up
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Nice, well I’m interested to see how you’ve set it up! I talked to my alarm company and they’ve given me a quote for the IP module, so I might see if I can reverse engineer the API (or find some docs). Maybe run the mobile app through a proxy and inspect some of the network requests to see if I can build a home assistant plugin.
I used to have a DIY Smanos system, and I miss having the automatic arming when we leave the house, and the scheduled “home mode” at night / disarming in the morning. The other thing is that it would be really nice to get the wired motion sensors hooked up to home assistant so I can use them to automate my lights. I might be able to use the inputs on a Shelly relay (or similar / DIY ESP32) and hook them up to the relay pins on the motion sensors. But it would be great if I can just get the status over the IP module.
Hi Nathan, In NZ too and have the AAP alarm, did you get anywhere monitoring the web interface?
Hi @stewartmyles, I haven’t actually got the WiFi module installed yet and have been tempted to build my own using an ESP32 board for a direct integration into Home Assistant via ESPHome. But I haven’t gotten around to that yet, and not sure if I’ll be able to figure it out. Have you got the WiFi module installed and the mobile app? I’d be interested to learn more about that. Is there a web interface where you can control the alarm and view the status of motion sensors?
I never understand statements like this. If the app has been released it must already be using the API, so it must be releasable. APIs are the very soul of computing, so if the devs are struggling to get the API “released” then I struggle to see why.
Most apps are free, so there is no power in keeping the API quiet, the only reason would be to sell more apps.
Oh wait a minute - perhaps they sell your data …
No I just have the AAP IP Module and the Elite Control mobile app this doesn’t provide any access to the sensors
Thanks @stewartmyles, that’s very helpful! I was thinking that I might be able to save some time if I just buy the AAP IP / WiFi module. But it’s $480 + GST, so I wanted to make sure it can do everything I need (arm / disarm, plus read the status of all the sensors.)
In that case, I’m going to take the alarm apart and have a look for a UART interface or see if I can communicate with it over TTL serial. Otherwise I could monitor the motion sensors directly with an ESP32 microcontroller, and forward the signals to the alarm using relays.
I can also transmit 433MHz RF signals with ESPHome using their remote transmitter component, so I could send the same RF commands as our alarm remotes to arm or disarm the system.
Quick update - I’ve still been thinking about this project and I decided to post on Reddit today. I saw this comment, and I think I agree that the easiest way forward is to just build my own alarm system in Home Assistant using Alarmo, using the wired motion sensors and siren/strobe.
These Konnected boards look cool, but I think I’ll just build my own with an ESP8266. The motion sensors are super easy to integrate using input pins, and I’ll use a relay to trigger the siren/strobe. I’ll probably also replace my alarm control panel in the garage with a Zigbee keypad, or maybe an Android tablet.
We also have some remotes on our keyrings to arm/disarm the alarm and open the garage door. I can probably use the same ESP8266 to run the remote receiver module in ESPHome and listen for those RF signals. Then we can keep using the remotes as well.
I think that’s the way to go!
You can do a keypad in esphome too.
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I got a proof-of-concept working with an ESP8266 dev board (Adafruit Feather HUZZAH) running ESPHome. So far I’ve got the 4 motion sensors working.
ESP8622 on a breadboard reading the motion sensor outputs
ESPHome configuration
Entities in Home Assistant
Now I’m playing around with Alarmo and it seems very straightforward. Should be really easy to control a relay with the ESP8266, and then I can configure Alarmo to trigger the siren and strobe if the alarm goes off.
Alarmo Sensor Configuration
Alarmo General Configuration + Modes
Alarmo Notification Configuration
So I can send a notification to all of our phones, computers, and could even tell our Alexa Echo devices to say something.
Very happy with this approach so far!
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I have managed to create my own integration using the following items:
- AAP RS232 board - RS232-BD - Accessories - Alarm Systems - Arrowhead Alarm Products
- Serial to USB adapter to connect to my HA PC
- NodeRed, with a heap of custom flows that send / receive data to the alarm using RS232 commands, and forward them to MQTT broker for use in HA
I’m thinking of updating the NodeRed flows to directly interface with HA instead of MQTT although its working fine ATM and have for several years now
I have seen some other links where people re-flash the IP Module with custom firmware and use a custom component that talks Telnet to the IP Module… but note you loose the ability to use the standard AAP mobile app with this option
I’m gonna post in that thread and see if we can get the custom component to support the serial interface as it looks like all the commands etc are the same
I also have an Elite-S AAP Alarm, and bought a konnected interface panel to integrate it… haven’t had much success and lack of guides online is definitely frustrating! I do wonder if others have done it before in NZ…
You can try this post, it already has a custom component for Home Assistant to work with the IP Module. You need to install a custom firmware the nice AAP guys developed for this. You can use almost every feature of the alarm in HA.
@ndbroadbent Are you able to share the code etc for your setup?
It also looks like you removed all the cables from the alarm panel zones and wired them into the esp?
And did you manage to work out how to arm and disarm using the ESP at all?
@cannons.for.u Mario C
Any chance you can share this with me?
Or if there’s another way to connect with homebridge now the new app is out
Thanks
Andy
@ndbroadbent Are you able to share a more detailed photo of your connections to the central? I would like to do the same, but i can’t check all the connections on your image.
Hi.
Tony here - first time poster.
Did anyone get hold of the ‘cheat sheet’ that Mario C talked about above? I reached out to him at Arrowhead to find that he had moved on. I have emailed his new contact details but no reply as yet (mind you its only been a day., that might still be coming). I think I have pieced together enough clues to connect and program up the keyswitch input to arm/disarm an ESL-2, and I can get the ‘alarm is sounding’ indication from the alarm relays. What I havent been able to sus out, is how to get the set/unset state of the alarm as a relay contact or digital output . What’s the trick for that? I intend to write up an ESP-8266 integration to do the glue logic.
I havent had any reply from Mario - either here or via the new business he works at. I am hoping to start my integration journey to the ESL-2 in the next couple of weeks, and still have no idea how to get hold of the Arm/Disarm state of the alarm system from the ESL-2 hardware. I understand how to trigger it to arm/disarm with the keyswitch, its the resulting state I cant get a handle on. Can anyone here give me a few hints on how to surface this?
I don’t know if this as an helpful for you but I send a mail to the company about the integration with HA and he says “we have this on our roadmap but not for this year…”
Asked about how can communicate and get info from the board and he says:
You can connect an RS232 board to the alarm panel.
You can use this to connect the alarm via a PC using an RS232 connection.