Remote Reed Setup

Hardware
1

Our house has a 1980’s alarm panel, with home run wires connecting to reed switches on every door and window. This old circuit board died, so last weekend I installed an old Atom server motherboard in its place with Home Assistant. Loving how all my IoT devices integrate! I started doing some research on how to connect my doors/windows, and read that a Raspberry Pi, with some resistors, looks like it can handle this using the GPIO.

Before I buy a Raspberry Pi 4 (which sadly, is faster than my Atom motherboard), I had a thought… On the other end of the house, I have a VMware server with plenty of resources to run HA. I do have a Raspberry Pi 2, and thought, is there a stand alone daemon that I can run, allowing the Pi 2 to handle the reed switches, connected via Ethernet to an instance of HA running on a virtual machine?

This way, I can use existing hardware opposed to buying something new… Thanks everyone!

2

I would probably used a ESP using ESP-home.
But depending on how many reed-switches you have then maybe one is not enough.

But they are easy and cheap to replace.
But it will be wireless instead of Ethernet.

3

Thank you! The wires from the Windows / doors are joined into zones, so I only have 5 zones. If I have to buy hardware, I may just get a raspberry Pi 4. Although the ESP stuff does look neat.

4

Integrating a PI to Home Assistant is much harder than an ESP.
But sure… you can probably use both.

5

Just wanted to chime in, not only did I find a remote reed project that HA supports, I ended up hooking my reed switches directly to my Pi. Everything works as it should. So far no false alarms etc.