Remote Reed Setup

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!

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.

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.

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

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.