This post hopefully clears up a lot of confusion around the use of Fire, Emergency, Panic and when the panel is Triggered. Also the differences between the Alarm Control Panel Entity and the Siren Entity and their use.
I thought this was obvious from the descriptions of the configuration settings and the Wiki but let’s see if we can clarify some things…
Specific to PowerMax
Let’s get this over with at the start…
There are no “commanded” functions/settings/actions to the panel for telling the panel to Trigger, Fire, Panic or Emergency. The only thing that you can change in the panel is to Arm and Disarm it (in the various ways of Arming).
You are not able to Trigger the Siren or command Panic, Emergency or Fire.
I’ll start with the functionality for all Panel Types: PowerMax and PowerMaster.
This is for all panel types as far as I know.
The Panel has 2 mostly independent functions, mapped to the following HA Entities:
- The Alarm Control Panel Entity: This is what you Arm, Disarm etc
- The Siren Entity: I do not get to know explicitly when your external Siren is making a loud noise. So I need you to tell me. You could lie
and set it to whatever you decide though. This is related to Fire, Emergency and Panic, as well as Triggering your external siren making a loud noise.
HA Event Bus
EDIT: I am removing the HA Event Bus selection from the configuration, assume that all are selected.
First of all, the following setting is used for when to create an HA Event on the Event Bus. It says so in the picture: “List of Sensor changes to create an Event”. This has nothing to do with the Siren Entity or the Alarm Control Panel Entity. The Integration either creates an Event in HA or not based on this setting.
The Siren Entity
The following is used to determine which of the various “triggers” are used to set the Siren Entity to “on”. The Siren Entity is a Switch in HA, but turning it “on” yourself is not yet implemented to Trigger your External Siren (and would then only work for PowerMaster panels, see below).
The Siren Entity has an Attribute called ‘alarm’, you can use this regardless of the above setting, the setting above determines which ‘alarm’ setting turns “on” the Siren Switch Entity.
The Alarm Control Panel Entity
The Alarm Control Panel Entity is what you use to Arm/Disarm the Panel. Its state is set to Disarmed, Armed Home etc and in addition, one of the possible states being “Triggered”
Assume it’s like only having the “Intruder” setting from the above list that sets this Entity to “Triggered”.
Let’s look at the additional capabilities only for PowerMaster Panels.
With a PowerMaster Panel you can also command Panic, Mute, Trigger, Fire and Emergency to your panel from Home Assistant.
To do this you use the same command as you do to Arm, Disarm etc:
action: visonic.alarm_panel_command
data:
entity_id: alarm_control_panel.visonic_alarm
command: fire
As I’ve said before, the use of Fire, Emergency, Panic and Mute do not change the Panel State (i.e. Armed, Disarmed) but Triggered does. The Panel can be Disarmed but you can command Fire to it. The Panel can be Armed and you can command Mute to it and the Panel stays Armed.
With my test PM30 it only let me command Trigger when the panel was Armed but there might be a panel setting that I haven’t found yet to change this.
I do hope this clarifies the current functionality and if you don’t understand then please ask, but don’t ask why you cannot trigger the alarm using an HA Action when you have a PowerMax Panel, you can’t.
I have only tested the PowerMaster functionality with my test PowerMaster 30 panel.
D
