So I am looking for a Zigbee or WiFi comptabile siren to either buy or build (preferably buy) that will work with HA.
Scenario is I have the Zigbee2MQTT dongle installed and running HASSIO on an RPi3, with the Aqara door/window sensors and a few Xiaomi Yi 1080P home cameras dotted across the house.
All works well and I can trigger an Echo Dot with an alert when any of them are triggered, however I would prefer to have an entry/exit tone (internally) and a siren externally, but am struggling without needing to buy additional gateways or Z-Wave dongles etc.
Having recently been in a similar boat: if you’re able, it’s not a difficult DIY. If you’re not, they’re a little pricey but drop-in is sometimes nice to have. I went with the DIY route because I already had most of the stuff on hand, but even buying everything new would be pretty cheap.
I had a siren around from an old, unused security install, but I made a second one with this one, and it works just as well. The sirens need a 12v power supply. My original hope was just to boost up to that from the 5v powering an ESP8266 but it wasn’t quite enough juice. In the end, I gave the unit 12v and tied in a 5v regulator to power the relay.
That 12v is switched on and off by one of those ubiquitous ESP-01 relay boards like this one (you can find them cheaper, if you’re willing to wait for shipping, or more expensive if you’re not). If you’re willing to pay $15 instead of like $4 (or, again, are willing to wait), a Sonoff SV can be powered directly from the 12v input, is super easy to flash, and works like a charm.
Both of these sirens are controlled by ESPHome, which I cannot recommend enough for DIY ~stuff~, especially with HASS. I have one more that’s controlled by my DIY-style Konnected install as part of the old security system. I don’t know if the firmware can be flashed to an ESP-01 but it should work just fine? That’s also a pretty rock-solid solution for software.
Anyways, once I gave up on powering via 5v, the whole project took something like an hour to do, and saved a good $50-60. Haven’t had any issues since.
Zigbee devices are connected thru a Conbee II stick and there it shows up as a ‘light’, when changing the name in phoscon (the webpage to manage your zigbee devices) it makes a lot of noise, so thats good.
Now I have to find out how to use it in Home Assistant.
Have you found out what you can do with it? Are you able to play different sounds for it? Or at least control the volume and pulselength of the sound?
So let’s make it little beep beeps to indicate an armed alarm, and then go in super loud “siren mode” when the alarm is triggered?
With an ESP8266 (Wemos D1 mini), a passive buzzer and the ESPhome software I have build my own “beeper”. It costs around 20€ and can beep in different frequencies.
Thought about that as well. A simple buzzer like that will work?
How do you set frequencies? Or maybe “melodies” like a siren that goes up/down/up in frequency to signal a problem, and a beep-beep as “normal” reminder.
Sure. That’s an easy one, and already works with konnected out of the box. But i’d like to have a multi purpose “siren”. Doesn’t need to be a real siren as such, but a device that can output different sounds of different volumes.
Eg. You arm the alarm, and you get a fast low beeping that signals the arming process, once it’s armed it makes a slow low volume beeping to indicate that the alarm is armed so you don’t forget to disarm. In case the alarm is triggered i want some loud siren mode.
Maybe use two different devices for that, but I’m open for ideas.
