SimpliSafe with HA

You’ll have to research it/ask, for any not understood or needed requirements, there’s a Noonlight integration in HACS. I don’t use monitoring myself. I think its about $10 per month.:person_shrugging:

Is it easy to cancel? I have no idea. Make sure it suits your needs if you go there. All DIY with Alarmo as you know. Your security may differ from my security needs.

Wyze and others use them for their home security monitoring.

Concerning SS. I’ll go all the way back to December 2022.

Car in my yard overnight, several times, neighbor reported it to me. Out of state tags. SS cameras saw nothing since, they only see about 30 feet for detections, exception, cars 150 feet away and tree limbs, birds, bugs etc. Zones are wishy washy also. Mine are practically pointed at the ground to avoid nuisance detections.

Called SS per their advertising as seen on TV and multiple get paid for click thru websites. Initial investment $1,348.00. 5 outdoor cams, 5 solar panels, 2 doorbells, base station and 25-30 sensors.

None of the cameras would connect properly to a single router for streaming TV and a phone or two etc. practically useless.

Tried WiFi extender. Laughable.
$250 later. Added Orbi mesh with two APs. Wifi everywhere and Dbm strength.

Multiple forced camera updates, usually fixed one thing and broke one or two other things.

I’ll say the sensors and base station have been fine, other than mostly useless for integration. Hiccups yes, nothing that forced me to return the base, only did the battery removal base reset once.

Doorbells x2, can’t connect to a single SSID broadcasting both frequencies router. Old technology wifi antennas. Can’t read the QR code. Used my old 2.4ghz router to get everything connected then transitioned to Orbi with same SSID name and password. Seamless connection.

Two many disconnects for viewing cams to mention, multiple random detections late last year for several months, live view excruciatingly slow. I’m all solar, no power cables for any or very little performance mode firmware advantage. Had to basically turn them all off or the batteries would have died with solar. Kind of defeats the purpose of security cameras.

Even so, some improvement with some bugs like no longer charging with performance mode 1.20 forced firmware to cameras. Eight seconds average live view now on outdoor cams, too slow probably to see a perp, but better, doorbells live view, hit or miss as well as getting successful uploads consistently. I’m 350Mbs down amd 24Mbs up.
Detections for some reason mostly ok for both.

Lived on their forum. :joy: Admins almost always point issues back at the customer. And in some cases rightly so if a weak, one router WiFi is in use. They hate me I’m sure. Lol

They should sell a mesh or at least warn a customer. Wyze sells a mesh. ADT sells a mesh for example. Not recommending either.:wink: Wifi strength matters.

The cameras system for me and many, many others, see their forum, at least is/was a very fiddly PITA, excluding the base and sensors.:crossed_fingers:

Late this spring thay offered me an all camera refund after threats of filing with my AG and theirs. Their AG just finished and won a similar lawsuit against Safe Home Security in Massachusetts. Some other states AGs also sued. About 6 million, took 5 years.

After all my complaints, I declined as not fair to them after using them for some 13 months, plus I’m too old to climb ladders to remove them frankly, needed my son to help install them. Not worth the hassle in the end. SMH. Made some of the animosity go away though.:person_shrugging:

Ongoing class action in California. NOMB
Ongoing case of copyright infringement. NOMB

Their retention policies to cancel. FTC Click to Cancel “might” fix that this year.

Absolutely closed system. Advertising is questionable there.

Foreign support is difficult via chat or voice, but not always. Who’s isn’t though these days.

They aren’t the old Simplisafe family owned business they used to be. Hellman & Friedman owns controlling stock. Water under the bridge now. Done with them, unless a warranty issue pops up in my 3 year warranty. The forum admins ignore my posts anyhow.

I added and have active about 10 Wyze inexpensive USB cameras looking thru my windows and screens.

The features in their app and cameras run circles around SS old 2017 to 2019 camera hardware and their app. They’ll stay in the windows even if I add Reolink doorbells and some outdoor Reolink IP POE cams. Redundancy and extra coverage.

Automations in app, SD card for 24/7 recording in every cam and their doorbells. 4 more on the way to be installed. Inexpensive. Throw away disposable cost. New V4 is $35±. Support like all most others, pathetic. But functional.

$99 per year for up to 99 cameras or $2.99 to $3.99 per month for one camera for extra app features. No hubs. I Started with 1 model OG to test and now have 14.:person_shrugging:

Perfect? No. Way better, definitely yes! No comparison in cost. Model OGs and V4 open live view in 1 second. Etc. Etc. Pan cams 3 seconds. Way less fiddling. I’ve seen animals at night I didn’t even know were there before.

Wyze is not terribly HA friendly yet…there is an integration in HACs for motion etc. Model OG no motion entity in HA.:person_shrugging: Fiddly to get cams in though, but it can be done. I haven’t. They did have cloud issues as reported on the web, but I dont have any in sensitive areas, pan cams in basement and garage. So I don’t really care. I use the app mostly anyhow.

The only way to know what isn’t being seen by SS cameras is to buy another brand, Wyze for example, and compare actual detections side by side. No battery cams or security companies for me ever again. Lesson learned. This is my story in brief, and may not be everyone’s. Some are happy with Simplisafe power cables attached.

Seems like I’m selling Wyze, I’m not really, it was recommended I try them on the Simplisafe reddit sub by the admin, so I did. No looking back now.

FYI I’ve started a project to be able to dump the private key from S3 window sensors via side channel power analysis. Afterwards we will be able to accurately use an SDR and decode the 433MHz payload and these sensors would be handled locally and the events would be instantaneous.

I’ll probably need 2-3 months but I’ll share what I find later on.

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Would the sensors still work with SS if you hacked them?

Thanks for sharing. I only use SS for monitoring the house and garage–door/window sensors and motion sensors. I have 3 of their indoor cameras; one pointing at each door (front and back), and one in the garage. These are only for their advertised confirmed intrusion service claiming faster response if they know there is someone in the house/garage.

For cameras I have my own CC system that my Reolink doorbell hooks up to along with 7 other cameras. I learned that lesson from when I had ADT; their cameras would only record for 30 seconds when motion was detected, then a 1 minute reset before they would record again. They were worthless.

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Yes, this should only provide the private key so that you can decode the payload with a cheap 433mhz sdr.

I’m trying to figure out what I broke in the integration.

Things I know I did recently, all on me.

Changed almost all SS sensor batteries.

Also started renaming SS Devices, to recognize sensors in HA easier. Stopped that for now, don’t know any better.

Several entity not available in SS integration.

Never mind, had to reselect the entities in the integration and then all those went away. Same for a zigbee sensor I renamed a few. Guess I can rename anything without causing issues.:wink::thinking:

Or if I knew how. :laughing:

Hi all. I just moved to a new house so I am completely reconfiguring HA from the ground up. As much as I dreaded it, it is nice to be able to incorporate all the things I learned from the first time around. My homeowners insurance required me to have a monitored alarm system. I knew I was going to go with HA, so I searched for something that would work well with it. SimpliSafe seemed to be the answer. It looks like the people who have it set up are doing exactly what I want to be able to do with it.

I am having a real problem getting this integration set up. I’ve tried through adding the integration in the UI, but the authorization link always comes up as a problem for SimpliSafe. I have 2FA in place, but every time I try to access the link that is provided by the set up routine again, I get an error from either the web browser or the SimpliSafe site. I cannot get to the point where I can go into the consul and retrieve that code. I have tried on mobile devices, as well as desktop through Safari chrome and Firefox. I just can’t get to that page.

I also went through and tried to configure manually with Python. Get an error when I get to the set up script:

at venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/poetry/installation/chef.py: 164 in_prepare
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error = ChefBuildError(“\n\n”- join(message_parts) )
162
163
if error is not None:
→ 164
raise error from None
165
166
return path
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168
def_prepare_sdist(self, archive: Path, destination: Path | None = None) - Path:
Note: This error originates from the build backend, and is likely not a problem with poetry but with multidic t (6.0.4) not supporting PEP 517 builds. You can verify this by running ‘pip wheel —-no-cache-dir —-use-pep51
7 “multidict (==6.0.4)”’.

I don’t know enough to know how to overcome this. I’ve tried AI as well as several Google searches. When I try to run the authorization script, I get that there’s a missing file.

I really have tried to exhaust all my self-help before getting to this point. I’m hoping someone can give me some guidance. Anxious to get this integration set up.

Running HA OS on a Nuc. So much faster and better than the Pi4 I ran at the old house.

Thanks to all for any help.

@Syvee
I have the integration setup, for what it’s worth.

The integration is great work, Simplisafe being a closed system, not so much for me anyhow.

You will probably be disappointed anyhow. The polling time on Simplisafe sensors can range from 1 to 20-30 seconds. Kind of useless for anything critical. Works on their base via RF ok.

So if you open a door, it can take a bit for the actual HA Simplisafe contact to open in the integration, and if you close the door before poll, I’m not sure HA ever knows or not. With that delay, I found it useless to me.

I still have it but about the only thing useful to me any more is looking at my HA to see if it armed or not.

What I did instead is loaded the Alarmo security system integration, probably in Hacs.

Very nice and flexible, kept up. I added parallel Zigbee Zha entry and some motions sensors 3 powered router and its working well. You gotta buy those. Lol, I have 25 aqara entry and two motion, may add leak later and more motion etc.

I only have Simplisafe self monitoring with cameras, junk cameras and doorbells, :joy:. For me anyhow. I dropped full monitoring when they didn’t call me on a false alarm. They’re policy vs my policy disagreement.

Check the requirements of your insurance, I’m fairly certain you can link Alarmo with Noonlight monitoring service, but there won’t be any cellular. Unless there’s an HA hack etc. Note, I do not have Noonlight. I won’t ever depend on someone’s call again.

As to that code, try various browsers, I couldn’t get it with Chrome or another I don’t remember, but think I got it in console with Firefox, and follow the directions exactly.

Any questions, holler and I’ll try to answer or say I don’t know.

@Syvee

My Zigbee mesh, I’m rather proud of until it breaks. Lol

Here’s more input that may or may not help from another user on SS forum. I had instructions but deleted mine ages ago.

"Ok, here’s a hack that seems to work. I did this with Chrome on MacOS, so if your system is different (or they change something) YMMV.

Log into your simplisafe account in a browser, and then open up the developer console. Specifically go to the network traffic tab.
Copy the “here” link from the Home Automation dialog into the browser, and let it not work (if it does the MFA email login, fine, but for me it was a gray screen).
One of the requests you’ll see in the network traffic log should have a 302 HTTP code and look like this: com.simplisafe.mobile://auth.simplisafe.com/ios/com.simplisafe.mobile/callback?code=abc123
That “abc123” is the auth code you need. Copy paste that back into your Home Automation dialog.

Update: Usage — simplisafe-python 2024.01.0 documentation is a cleaner way, if you’re comfortable with running Python libraries."

Wow! Thank you Dave for those great replies!! Discouraging to hear that SS lags so bad. I was hoping to use those sensors. I’ll give the Chrome thing a try. Last system I basically did similar to you. Aeotec had these great Zwave sensors that would mount inside the door. They worked great and had great battery life. Fast. Zwave in general always worked well for me, but that stuff Is so much more expensive than every other thing. Especially Zigbee. It sounds like I’ll need to look into the Alarmo thing. Thanks a million for the replies. I’ll let you know what happens!

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I currently have an HA Green with a Skyconnect Zigbee dongle.

With 3 Aeotec routers and 25ish sensors so far, its been solid.

Of course Aqara Zigbee entry sensors can be a little finicky and I had to pair some more than once to connect to the router or coordinator as I wanted.

Alarmo is an excellent integration so far for me and I like it. It’s like Simplisafe on steroids, lots of features, open source, SS will never or in the near future have.

I don’t need personally want paid monitoring, its a racket anyhow, IMHO. Of course I’m retired, home a lot, and protect my home and family, my way, if forced to. Hopefully not required. Can see that some want it and need it.

Now, if I could find a great zigbee or zwave siren in the USA, some overseas that i can’t purchase.

But I go around it with my phone and the Tasker app or Samsung modes and routines for some automations, to setoff a siren upon alarm triggered, to a loud Bluetooth speaker at night, push notifications from HA.

Don’t know if i mentioned it above, old and forgetful lol, but there’s also an integration to link a Ring V2 keypad into Alarmo. It went fairly easy as well. I think it was $25. Plus a Zooz Zwave dongle. Mines fully operational along side SS, until it fails or my 3 year warranty expires, then it’ll be compely replaced.

I stuck a bunch of Wyze cams inside looking out in window mounts, wifi yes, no good integration yet with HA, but run circles around SS camera’s. Cheap too, disposable cheap.

Old but still learning. Lol actually fairly newb with home assistant.


I’ve been using the SS integration, and I am totally happy with it. I agree with everything Dave has said re: professional monitoring being a racket; however, I need professional monitoring. I am out of town and off grid A LOT. Even with professional monitoring, the police response time is awful if they don’t think any lives are in danger. They once took 2 hours to respond to an ADT alarm when I had them for security. But someone could effectively clean my house out in the time I’m gone.

The SS system sensors are useful as long as you the delay is okay with you. For doors that I want instant response for something in HA, I have the Aeotec door sensors @Syvee mentioned that are recessed inside the door/door jam. The only automation I have on the windows is to turn the HVAC off if certain windows are open more than 3 minutes. I don’t need it to be exactly 3 minutes, so the SS sensors are fine for that and those automation have worked great.

The other automation that I have integrated with SS that is THE MOST used and appreciated automation in my system is auto arming. Using the HA app, when all occupants have left the home, SS automatically arms AWAY mode (there are additional automations as well like turning of flights, locking doors, etc). A confirmation text is then sent to the phones from SS that the system is armed. Before this, I’d arm the system maybe 20% of the time when I leave the house but am not leaving town. Now I am getting far more use of my security system. I also have a guest mode in HA that disables certain automations (this being one) so it won’t arm if we have guests.

Outside this, I haven’t thought of any other really useful ways to integrate SS with HA, but that one automation is worth having HA in itself for me and my family.

I haven’t heard of a homeowner’s policy requiring security. that sounds like a racket. Mine gives a discount on insurance, but it’s minimal… maybe a month’s worth of monitoring.

Kind of disappointing about the 60 second poll time.

I was the maintainer for the ADT Pulse HACS integration and it was able to poll every .5 seconds.

@bachya Is there perhaps another way to get quicker results from the system? I saw in the docs there is some way to use secret alert events, but I’m not sure how one would use it.