RS232 Alarm Keypad

Configuration
1

Greetings All,
I have a Alarm System that has a RS232 interface board that replicates everything you would see and use on a fully functional keypad. For example, you could connect this device to HyperTerminal and see all the LCD text that you’d expect to see on a normal LCD keypad.
The standard physical keypad has 2 lines of 16 characters that scroll through the menus.
In all it has 20 buttons on the keypad and a LCD with 2 lines of text, all which can be emulated in a serial console. (HyperTerminal, Putty etc)
What integration should I be looking at to attempt to link a USB RS232 on a Pi to my Interface Board to get a fully functioning replication of my Alarm Keypad?

2

Might be no harm mentioning the brand of alarm as there might already be a platform for it.

3

Thanks Pete,
There won’t be a platform for this item - it is a legacy system from 2005.
I’ve just been testing with HyperTerminal and everything works from there.
Basically, a Serial Console within HA (Display) and a Keypad I can set values under each button would be ideal.

4

In the absence of any hardware specifics, you’ll need to install something like pyserial to expose the serial port to HA. Something like this my be the direction to go DSC PowerSeries Alarm - IT-100 (RS232)

5

I’ve been able to use command line switches to transmit to the alarm panel, this is working well.
It is logging into the alarm with any PIN code that is programmed into the alarm system by pressing the switches. However this currently leaves the switches on, and shows the 4 digits of the PIN I just used. So I just need buttons that “pulse” / “blink”.

I would like to have something like the alarm decoder where I can put the command line switch under each button and only have it “blink” when I tap the numbers in. I also need to have buttons that are specific to this alarm system, E.g below, the alarm has several buttons, ON, OFF, OK, END, MENU, HELP. Would this have to be a custom card?

Also to get the LCD working is the serial data coming back from the alarm. E.g. the 2 x 16 Character LCD messages. Currently I just has a message of “Unkonwn”

Terminal-Emulator
Terminal-Emulator1000×817 15.2 KB

Command line below:

  • platform: command_line
    switches:
    te1:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “1” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te2:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “2” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te3:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “3” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te4:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “4” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te5:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “5” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te6:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “6” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te7:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “7” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te8:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “8” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te9:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “9” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    te0:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “0” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    teok:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “:” > /dev/ttyUSB0’
    teend:
    command_on: ‘cat -v /dev/ttyUSB0 | echo -e -n “>” > /dev/ttyUSB0’