I have a driveway sensor that when it is triggered, it plays sound on a receiver inside my house. I want to essentially make this sensor smart so that when it is triggered, i can either get a notification or use it to trigger automations. My thought so far would be to use a smart reed switch / contact sensor, and hook the speaker output of the speaker to the input connections of the reed sensor. So whenever voltage is sent to the speaker to make noise, it will close the reed sensor circuit and change the sensors state.
Need to know as much about the system as possible before we can answer if thees a ‘better way’ we don’t know anything about how it works. What kind of sensor is it? What does that connect to? What generates the sound?
I have a simple driveway alarm that when an object breaks all 3 lasers, it tells the receiver/speaker in the house to play a sound to notify that it was triggered. There is nothing smart about it. I just want to be able to know when this happens without being home to hear the speaker. Are there smart sensors that will “Activate” when voltage is detected? Since the dumb alarm system only make a sound, my thought is that if there was some sort of voltage sensor that i could use with HA, whenever sound is playing at the dumb receiver, it is sending voltage to the speaker itself, if i tapped into that, i could use it similar to a motion sensor. So there would be two states: Voltage, or No Voltage. If there is voltage, i could use that as a trigger to say turn on lights, or send a notification to my phone. the alarm system that i have is this: Amazon.com
I think your best bet is to poke around with a multimeter and try to find an “enable signal”. Basically you need a trace that turns on or off when the sensor is triggered.
