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Adventures With Home Assistant
The story so far
I've fallen into the giant tar pit known as Home Assistant.
For those of you who are familiar, you know what the symptoms are; terrible urges to automate something that (probably) doesn't need it, Amazon wish lists full of sensors and gadgets to control, and lots of time reading articles and watching YouTube videos about Home Assistant. I'm a goner.
I'd like to take a moment to thank my friend Kevin for introducing me to this new obsession. It took a little while to take hold, but here I am.
So here's where I'm at and (maybe?) where I'm going with Home Assistant. My wife and I just bought our first house, and it came with a home security system! Thats cool and all, but I don't want to pay the $50 monthly fee to have someone call the police or fire department or whatever. It makes sense for some people, but I don't feel that it really makes sense for us at this time. I do, however, want to have a subset of the features of that security system though.
What came with the house
The Panel
Ok, so the house came with a 2GIG GC2E security panel installed, which has Z-Wave capability as well as the capability to monitor 345Mhz devices. It also has a 4G LTE radio that connects to the monitoring company. Once I called to ask about the price and politely told them I wasn't interested, I got a nice alert when they disconnected the 4G radio.
The Door Lock
This was a nice one. A Yale YRD110ZW keypad lock with Z-Wave. Having done some physical security work in a previous life, I can appreciate this one. Powered by 4 AA batteries, with a terminal on the front for a 9 volt jump-start if the battery dies and you're locked out. Z-Wave allows for locking, unlocking, monitoring lock state, managing codes, and some other configuration options. Nice!
Video doorbell
There's a SkyBell SlimLine doorbell on the front door. This is a model that is tied specifically to Alarm.com, so there is some kind of integration between Alarm.com and the monitoring company that allows a subscriber to access the doorbell features that way. This model cannot be added to the normal SkyBell apps and used without Alarm.com. A few Reddit posts suggested that was possible, but I wasn't able to make that work.
Door/Window contacts
There are three contacts on the external doors to determine if the door is open or closed. These are battery powered 345Mhz devices connected to the security panel. Probably the workhorse of the system honestly, as most of the alarm states would be triggered by a door being opened while the system was armed. No contacts on windows though.
Motion detector
There is a motion detector downstairs. This is presumably to handle an intruder who enters through a basement window rather than a main level door. Also battery powered and 345Mhz.
The Plan
Well, if I'm not paying the monitoring company, then what are my options? Here's how I see it: 1. Go without - This is the null case, and to be fair, has been the status quo my entire life. 2. Use the 2GIG panel without monitoring - This would work, but I'd have no indication of an alarm when I was not in the house. 3. Buy a consumer security system like Arlo or Google - This is expensive and means that I'd not be in complete control of my data. 4. Build something using Home Assistant - Time consuming, and also potentially pricey, but it would work how I want it to and be completely adapted to my privacy tolerances.
Given the title of this blog post, I'll bet you can figure out which option I plan to go with...
So first things first; the doorbell isn't ever going to work in this scenario. I replaced that with a Reolink WiFi doorbell. Since the SkyBell was powered through the standard 16VAC transformer used by most traditional doorbells, I went with the non-PoE model. I love this thing! I had to tweak my pfSense firewall rules to enable off-network access, but it checks all the boxes.
Next, I need some way for Home Assistant to talk to things without doing a lot of wiring. The front door lock and the 2GIG panel have Z-Wave, so I bought a Z-Wave USB dongle for my Raspberry Pi Home Assistant server. I went with the Zooz 800 long-range USB stick, and that works great. The lock needed to first be removed from the previous Z-Wave network before I could add it to the Home Assistant network, but it integrated perfectly. The 2GIG panel, however, did not. It was built to be a primary controller, so there are only two things I can read from it, neither useful for anything. I think there is a way to set up a dry contact wired to the panel to get an alarm status, but I really don't want to do that.
That takes care of Z-Wave things, but what about the 345Mhz stuff? I had hoped I'd be able to use the panel as a bridge for that, but since that is a bust, I need to figure something else out. I found a couple posts talking about using software-defined-radio (SDR) to interface with these kinds of devices, but it looks pretty complicated involving a separate linux host, some SDR hardware and probably more time than I'm willing to spend. Anything SDR just automatically sounds that way to me though. I plan to buy some replacement contact sensors that use Z-Wave and integrate those directly to Home Assistant. In the future, I may also add Zigbee to the Raspberry Pi to open the horizon even more, but for now, Z-Wave is fine.
Once I get contacts integrated, I should be able to create a series of automations and scripts in Home Assistant that will be able to intelligently arm and disarm based on whether all sensors are showing a secure state, and that my wife and I are home or not. Of course, I'll still be able to manually arm/disarm as well. I don't think I'll replace the motion detector though. I will probably just use contacts on the two basement windows instead.
To be continued...
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