A very nice idea for arming/disarming your alarm is to hide NFC tags under the light switches next to your entry door. This way you can just scan the switch when you come home or go out. I've hidden a NFC tag under the hallway switch next to my apartment door and it's brilliant - when you go out, you scan the hallway light switch and boom - your alarm is armed. The only thing with this approach is that you will want a backup way to disarm the alarm in case you come home with a dead phone. This is not needed if you just switch some lights on/send notifications on alarm trigger, but 100% mandatory if there is a siren in the mix. I've created an automation in my bathroom where on switch double-click the fan turns on for 30 minutes, so maybe having a designated "disarm switch" in your apartment will also work. That's the thing with Home Assistant, you can literally do anything!
On top of this I would add a Guest code so people don't know your standard alarm code if you need someone to come over whilst on vacation and say feed the pets and you can easily toggle this on or off or have it as part of your Guest mode automations for the entire home.
I would like to suggest some advanced functions that would be interesting to know if they can be implemented in Alarmo and explain in the following video: - NFC Tags for arming/disarming with mobile phones - NFC keys or ibuttons for each member of the family - Code to disarm but also send hidden warning in case of duress. - Notifications in case of power cuts or wifi jammers - Panic button with sending of warnings
All this can be done easily enough. You just need the right sensors and to have automations setup to detect the things. All the alarm system is when done in Home Assistance is automations. I would not use it for a silent duress system though. If you need a duress system, I would use a professional system that can notify the correct authorities instantly. If there is a duress situation and you miss a notification, it would mean missed duress situations. Other than that, if the setup in this video doesn't have the features, just create the automations to add what you need. The custom component just sets up all the correct automations,
You can hide an NFC tag behind the light switch near the front door and create an automation that arms or disarms the alarm when you scan that tag with your phone. Since everything in Home Assistant is a service, you can arm/disarm your alarm with absolutely everything - keypad, NFC tag, whatever. If you want to do it with an NFC chip on a keyring (which is a bit insecure in my opinion) - you would need a NFC tag reader using ESPHome or similar. Then you can create an automation based on that. The way I am doing it is by having a NFC tag inside of the apartment for disarming, and an NFC tag outside for arming.
@@Tech_Verse Yes, that's definitively a weak spot, which made me think if I would rather just buy one of these tuya alarm centrals. Sensors are cheaper and they have GSM/4G connectivity integrated. This way you can receive notifications via SMS and phone calls as a backup. The downside of these systems is that most of them use 433Mhz for sensor communication which can easily be jammed.
And there it is... a video showing off what I have just finished setting up. My sensors and siren are all done with esphome though, since the house already had sensors and a siren hardwired for an old alarm system I repurposed them using 2 D1 mini's flashed with ESPHome. A fingerprint/tag reader at the frontdoor finished the whole system. Combined with a smart lock (self build) I now need nothing but my fingers to have my house secure but accessable for me. I did however implement everything in stages. I wouldn't want a siren bothering the neigbours for a false trigger. Now that everything is adjusted perfectly I hooked up the siren.
Great video as always.. Loads of information.. and no doubt will wear out the pause button for a lot of people.. including myself. Personally as you might have guessed i've built my smart alart with node red, with home away and night time mode thanks to your bed sensor as a trigger. I'll have to look up that alarm keypad panel, My advanced options is if a pir sensor is triggered. I get an actionable notification to my mobile and a photo from the CCTV camera in that location with a "sound alarm y/n?" if yes then my external wled lights do the police pattern and trigger a relay to turn on a 12v 130dB siren for 60 seconds ! NICE !. 🙂
This reply isn't a rebuttal to the message in your video, but my situation may apply to some of your viewers. A traditional hard-wired purpose-built security system was installed in my home when it was built in 2011. As home automation matured, I decided I wanted to expose the security system to automation and ran into a roadblock. The original system couldn't do that so I replaced it with another purpose-built traditional security system that could. I now have automatic arm/disarm through the integration of my HA system and free location services on our smartphones. I can use time of day, or modes, to arm/disarm if I choose. I still have a rock-solid alarm system that is fully independent of my HA system so a bug-inducing software update to the HA system doesn't threaten home security monitoring. I don't have to worry about challenges and idiosyncrasies of wi-fi, or Zigbee/Z-Wave technologies. I get home security alerts on my smartphone and am my own monitoring service, and sadly that was tested a year ago when I received a fire alarm notification while away from home. Thankfully, that was a false alarm due to a power outage/surge that triggered the whole-home, wired, fire alarms to trigger. I called the local fire department, and they dispatched a truck. I unlocked the house, and they did a thorough check before I could arrive.
Hey Lewis I do something similar with the auto arm, I just have a group for the family members so if any is home, the group state is home etc, and I also have a condition set to say if all alarm sensors (group once again) are inactive for 2 minutes and family group is not home then arm… works like a charm :)
I am also curious about this. I checked the suggested keypad but it seems like I need to pay a lot of money for the privilege to buy just the keypad. This is unacceptable for me.
@@EverythingSmartHome correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't an easier way to accomplish this part is just do a trigger on zone.home < 1 ? this is how i've been doing my auto AC turn off. faster to script, cleaner to maintain. And I just do zone.home > 0 to turn the AC back on.
Can confirm on the Aqara contact sensor. They are BRILLIANT. There's a video out there comparing contact sensors, and the end result was: Not even going to discuss the others, just get the Aqara. It's absolutely worth it to just get a Zigbee USB stick if you don't have a Zigbee network yet and use the Aqara contact sensors. Can't yet confirm on the Aqara motion sensor, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's equally awesome.
I’m thinking I could buy an actual Honeywell Vista or GE Interlogix security panel, (I’m not sure if these are thing in the UK as I live in America.) and have all the wired sensor inputs on the central panel instead be wireless Z-Wave relays, So when a door is opened or a motion sensor is triggered, the home assistant system could receive and repeat that signal and activate the corresponding Z-Wave relay on the central panel. Then I could possibly reverse engineer the keypad bus for the panel and create my own wireless keypad interface for the panel that I could program into home assistant. Essentially what I mean is to install a traditional security system, just retrofitted to be wireless and controlled with home assistant. This way monitoring companies can still hook up their communications equipment to my system since it’s a traditional panel their used to working with.
I suggest to use a time pattern (i.e. every 1 minute) to trigger if alarmo is on or off, because I had a situation where I was home but my wifi signal is sometimes weak in one room. Then Alarmo gets activated because I was not connected to my wifi for some time. But here is the thing: If my phone re-connects with the wifi, Alarmo is still armed and won't change its armed status. But when I set a time pattern as a trigger, it checks i.e. every minute if I am home or not and than changes to the correct armed/disarmed state. P.s. At least the 'from home' section should not be selected as trigger like in the video because then only the state changes when I was connected to the wifi and disconnect but not vice versa. Pretty good video though. Helped me a lot to get an insight.
I love alarmo. Have been using it more or less since Niels released it. I am doing all my automations in node red rzthe than in alarmo as I want advanced stuff ^_^ For example when a camera detects motion it takes a picture but I'm giving the person in the house 30 seconds to disable the alarm before I send our phones a notification with that picture. I also built a state machine like automation that determines what mode the alarm should be in based on our locations, Google calendar, etc etc.
Unsolicited suggestion: For the lights when the alarm goes off save the current state of the lights as a temporary scene and then trigger a specific scene you've made for the alarm being triggered. Then on disarm trigger the prior temporary scene to restore the lights back to the way they were before the alarm went off.
If you already have a tablet used as a kiosk then adding an alarm panel card (a keypad card, really) to it to control the alarm would be free and more convenient and would look better than a dedicated hardware keypad that you have to buy and install.
Nice job Lewis, really Great Video! A great way to make what you already have even more useful. While I am not ready to implement them yet, I would love to see some of the more advanced features you talked about as well.
Smarthomejunkie did a good video on this recently as well. Home Assistant has a lot of features that lean toward a basic alarm system. Especially with triggerID's and able to do conditions and actions based on TriggerID's, it is just made so much easier now. I like the cusom component you are using. It really does make it easier, though I do prefer not using HACS. It's a little more work, but all can be done with standard automations :). Great tutorial video though. There are so many different ways to do these sort of things
There is indeed many different ways to do things - I used to use regular automations to do it for about 2 years so yeah does work good, just a bit more work!
Sods law Alarmo wasn't around when I wanted mine so my solution was a Tuya alarm with 433MHz sensors, so bought this and pulled the sensors onto HA with a SonOff 433 bridge. plus side 433MHz sensors and detectors are dirt cheap
problem with a large number of smart alarms is the lack of an outdoor powered siren.....I know some do...Boundry being one...and Somfy one has a battery based one...which is a terrible idea...luckily home assistant has allowed me to make my Eufy Floodloght cam my outdoor alarm siren.....
Add some zwave dead bolts to it so you get notifications on them being unlocked, and maybe some way to quickly visually indicate the status of all door, window and lock sensors. Those innovelle switches look like they would be great if you can get your hands on them.
Going to the link for the Develco Siren, I found that you can't actually buy a single item on the site.. They insist on giving you a customised package with the gateway and everything... Is there any where else that I can buy just the alarm? With an existing HA setup, there is no need to buy other stuff...
Would love a more advanced tutorial! I opted out of getting an alarm installed just recently because of the monthly expenses and everything running on their cloud.
As always informative video, thanks Lewis I have been using Alarmo for awhile and it is working great, maybe an old table (if there is a one) showing HA dashboard besides exit door instead of the keypad save some money 🤑 Tip for automation condition use group of all the inhabitants and its state will be away if nobody home otherwise it would be home
The IKEA Tradfri motion sensors are quite good and very inexpensive. I’m using two of the Aqara for sensors on my garage doors, and I agree they work well. One thing to be aware of…they have temperature sensors built in, but I find they read a few degrees too warm. Wish the “easy” mode didn’t require installing HACS. I tend to stick with the add-on store, so there are a number of things I’ve just skipped due to the HACS dependency.
Great video. I have my arm / disarm with no PIN as I did not want a keypad. It is just a button on the app, which made it easier for the wife/kids. I also used your automation for arming the alarm as everyone always forgets. Please do the advanced video. P.s I was also your 1000 like on this video. Love your work ❤
I was thinking about this recently too. I normally don’t mind spending a bit of money on quality stuff. But £75 for a siren seems a bit expensive. Keypad I personally could easily do without. But am on the look out for a siren/ say half that price though.
This is on my list of things to do. Thanks for pointing out that that there are zigbee keypads. I was already aware of the Sirens and I have my eye on a ZWave smoke detector. Now the hunt is on for one of those keypads that is a little more reasonable. Converting to CAD makes the price even more intimidating. Good job as usual Lewis it has been really great to watch you and your channel grow.
Awesome video. I wanted to setup an alarms system for the longest time the manual way. Really glad I put it off for so long and saw your video first. Also would be really interested in some advanced stuff.
Nice video! I have been looking at replacing my smoke and heat alarms with 'smart' ones for a while. But i have been looking at wired ones since the housr is already wired for them. The only one i have found so far are the nest ones, but you can't really interact with them outside of he nest app and i don't really like the idea of relying on 3rd party. i do like the idea of using the smoke alarm as intruder alarm speakers though...that's brilliant. Looking forward to the advanced video.
Great vid as always, and I recently followed a tutorial to build a circuit integrating my Honeywell alarm to HA. I enjoy having disarm when I arrive home, but see issues with auto-arming, such as if you leave a housekeeper or someone else working at your home.
I would love for you to help me get my light strips in the kitchen to go red and blue like yours in this video and also my hue lights to alternate Red Blue when a alarm is triggered or in my case when the panic button is pressed.
Super nice - I just did it first time before summer holidays and it worked well. However, instead of buying sensors for 20+ GBP I built them myself on ESP32 so the total cost was close to nothing. One can also create actions for the cameras at home (if there is any) to i.e. start recording or take a snapshot - much lighter than motioneyeos I believe. Anyway, motion sensors are known to false positive alarms - at least that is what I noticed - even the original Aqara has this issue.
Nice - motion sensors don't have false positives, at least good quality ones. The inexpensive ones people usually use on esp32s are very prone to false positives, but good quality ones never falsely trigger (like the one we are using in the upcoming sensor)
@@EverythingSmartHome Before I deployed bunch of my DIY motion sensors, I bought Aqara one and I put them together in one place: imagine - both were triggering false positives, even the one for so much money ;-)
Great video. Lewis!! I need to get started on this, for sure, and your video has given me the energy to get going. I already have lots of the components. Quick question before I've been able to dive in..does Alarmo support a media player as a destination for a notification (or) can I have Alexa make an announcement if an alarm is triggered?? Thanks! Oh, and I'd love to see more videos targeted at advanced capabilities as well as more alarm-related devices. Oh, one more question...does the cell phone home/away simply get triggered when your phone goes off the home wifi?? What if you (for some reason) turn off your phone?? Thanks, again!! ~Frank
Thank you sooo much for this great Video. I would like a more advanced video that shows how to integrate the Develco keypad with Home Assistant and do you recommend any NFS Tags that I can use/integrate with the Develco keypad?
Super nice tutorial ! I followed it to activate my alarm when both are leaving. Is it possible to also deactivate it when at least one of us is coming back home ? Are there any possibilities to make the siren (Heiman) beep when delay time is running ?
Great video, lots of useful information! Now I think that having a smart home alarm is actually a must-have. I have small additional info cause I think that a great app for facility maintenance is SIM-ON, it’s worth knowing 😊
Thanks for the Alarmo tip! I've a similar setup with Aqara motion sensors & contact sensors and the Develco siren and keypad. I am however struggling with the setup of the keypad. As of now, I can only get it to use the default code. An explanation on how to change this would be highly appreciated!
Thanks for this really helpful video. I've used it to get up and running on Alarmo, amazing! I have a Hive homeshield keypad that was recognised by ZHA in Home Assistant, how can I go about integrating it with Alarmo to input the arm and disarm pin codes, would be great to see a video on that!
Great video👍, thanks. If I have HAOS on a dedicated NUC, where I can find Alarmo add-on as I only see video talking about HACS way to download it. Or It should be found only through HACS only?
hi lewis, great video as always. how have your develco devices held up please? would you still recommend all of them? or have you found an alternative you like better? should I hold off for matter support?
Advice needed…not tech savvy at all. Want door, window & leak sensors and something that announces when doors/window opened or an alarm. Is there something you suggest that I could buy and set up quickly that’s reliable? I’ve been told to have a local set up rather than WiFi but that confuses me. Have you heard of yolink or should I purchase aqara devices? If I buy all devices from same company, I could just purchase their hub correct and that’s all I’d need?
How do you tell an IKEA Tradfri RGB lightbulb to turn red on alarm state? Or to go through some programmed cycle of on and off etc? It seems all HA offers in the UI is to power on or off a tradfri build in automations (while the lamps card in the dashboard allows color change, dimming etc).
i created a binary sensor for when everyone is not_home. Create it once and not have to have so may conditions. You can keep expanding the tracker portion. If everyone is not_home the sensor turns off and the alarm arms. if one person is not_home the sensor stays on binary_sensor: - platform: template sensors: people_home: value_template: >- {{ is_state('device_tracker.', 'home') or is_state('device_tracker.', 'home')}}
I am a big fan of Kwikset Z-Wave locks. They are reasonably priced, and they can be rekeyed very easily. As a side effect of the easy of rekeying, they are virtually impossible to pick (I've had to call a locksmith to open some dumb versions of this lock).
I’ve always debated whether to set an alarm by location or a pin code and which one would be quicker to activate and more secure 🤔 how do you find it by location?
Fantastic to see this broken down into very approachable steps! BTW, you may not know but the value of a zone entity is now the amount of people in the zone. As such, it may be possible to simplify the auto-arming by using a trigger like the following: ```yaml platform: numeric_state entity_id: zone.home below: 1 ``` Keep up the fantastic work!
Thanks! Of course you can use zone, I opted to show the other way because the zone functionality is a fairly recent addition which some people might not have updated too yet.
I was so excited to set this up, only to discover that Alarmo isn't an option in the integration menu any longer. Has this been replaced with something? renamed? Or is there another option that you would recommend (or anyone reading this comment?)
never mind it looks like the way HACS integrations work has changed? you now have to go directly to HACS to add integrations, not the HA settings->devices/integrations->add
Do you have any concerns with people using jammers with these wireless systems? I have heard of cases where wireless cameras have been affected using cheap wireless jammers.
Not had any problems no - like I say this is not as feature rich as a fully professional installed alarm system, but better than not having anything at all!
I got the frient KEPZB-110. Zigbee2mqtt recognises it as the DEVELCO KEYZB-110. With blueprint 'Zigbee2MQTT - Control Alarmo via keypad' the keypad works with Alarmo.
Isn't it better to create a user group in yaml with all the persons of the household? All=false, so that if the last person leaves the house/geofence only then the alarm will be armed (and optionally when the first person arrives the alarm is disarmed) 👌
So isn't the person going to cut the power before breaking in? So many people don't even have locks on their breaker panels. Flip of a switch... no power. No more home assistant. Security systems have battery backup. Someone might want to look into Abode home security or something like that. No monthly monitoring subscription required (it is available though). If your power is cut the hub will still be online with a wireless 4G connection. It will still be able to alert you. I'm wondering if there is a reasonable way to achieve this without such a system.
@@EverythingSmartHome I live in California. Seems like the majority of homes I've seen (including mine) have them on the outside IN FRONT of the fence / gate so the power company can access them? Seems really stupid to me.
The advanced video would be hugely appreciated
Coming up!
I would second this. Is it coming soon?
Did it land?
Yup we waiting for that video 😂
Is there still an advanced video planned? I'm struggling to get my frient keypad working and would love a guide to do so!
A very nice idea for arming/disarming your alarm is to hide NFC tags under the light switches next to your entry door.
This way you can just scan the switch when you come home or go out. I've hidden a NFC tag under the hallway switch next to my apartment door and it's brilliant - when you go out, you scan the hallway light switch and boom - your alarm is armed.
The only thing with this approach is that you will want a backup way to disarm the alarm in case you come home with a dead phone. This is not needed if you just switch some lights on/send notifications on alarm trigger, but 100% mandatory if there is a siren in the mix.
I've created an automation in my bathroom where on switch double-click the fan turns on for 30 minutes, so maybe having a designated "disarm switch" in your apartment will also work.
That's the thing with Home Assistant, you can literally do anything!
On top of this I would add a Guest code so people don't know your standard alarm code if you need someone to come over whilst on vacation and say feed the pets and you can easily toggle this on or off or have it as part of your Guest mode automations for the entire home.
I would like to suggest some advanced functions that would be interesting to know if they can be implemented in Alarmo and explain in the following video:
- NFC Tags for arming/disarming with mobile phones
- NFC keys or ibuttons for each member of the family
- Code to disarm but also send hidden warning in case of duress.
- Notifications in case of power cuts or wifi jammers
- Panic button with sending of warnings
All this can be done easily enough. You just need the right sensors and to have automations setup to detect the things.
All the alarm system is when done in Home Assistance is automations. I would not use it for a silent duress system though. If you need a duress system, I would use a professional system that can notify the correct authorities instantly. If there is a duress situation and you miss a notification, it would mean missed duress situations.
Other than that, if the setup in this video doesn't have the features, just create the automations to add what you need. The custom component just sets up all the correct automations,
Will note them down, thanks!
You can hide an NFC tag behind the light switch near the front door and create an automation that arms or disarms the alarm when you scan that tag with your phone.
Since everything in Home Assistant is a service, you can arm/disarm your alarm with absolutely everything - keypad, NFC tag, whatever. If you want to do it with an NFC chip on a keyring (which is a bit insecure in my opinion) - you would need a NFC tag reader using ESPHome or similar. Then you can create an automation based on that.
The way I am doing it is by having a NFC tag inside of the apartment for disarming, and an NFC tag outside for arming.
Wondering....How to send the Notifications in case of power cuts or wifi jammers?
@@Tech_Verse Yes, that's definitively a weak spot, which made me think if I would rather just buy one of these tuya alarm centrals. Sensors are cheaper and they have GSM/4G connectivity integrated. This way you can receive notifications via SMS and phone calls as a backup. The downside of these systems is that most of them use 433Mhz for sensor communication which can easily be jammed.
Please, please do make a follow-up video on how to set up a keypad and other environmental sensors! Thank you so much for this video.
Yes please! I would love an advanced video. Getting an alarm system setup was already my next big Home Assistant project.
Nice, thanks!
And there it is... a video showing off what I have just finished setting up.
My sensors and siren are all done with esphome though, since the house already had sensors and a siren hardwired for an old alarm system I repurposed them using 2 D1 mini's flashed with ESPHome. A fingerprint/tag reader at the frontdoor finished the whole system. Combined with a smart lock (self build) I now need nothing but my fingers to have my house secure but accessable for me.
I did however implement everything in stages. I wouldn't want a siren bothering the neigbours for a false trigger. Now that everything is adjusted perfectly I hooked up the siren.
Don't think we didn't notice the presence sensor site in the squarespace segment... so excited for this
👀👀
Thank you for all you do to get people up to speed on Home Assistant! I am a HUGE fan. A follow-up video would be very much appreciated!
Great video as always.. Loads of information.. and no doubt will wear out the pause button for a lot of people.. including myself. Personally as you might have guessed i've built my smart alart with node red, with home away and night time mode thanks to your bed sensor as a trigger. I'll have to look up that alarm keypad panel, My advanced options is if a pir sensor is triggered. I get an actionable notification to my mobile and a photo from the CCTV camera in that location with a "sound alarm y/n?" if yes then my external wled lights do the police pattern and trigger a relay to turn on a 12v 130dB siren for 60 seconds ! NICE !. 🙂
Really looking forward to the keypad integration video. Thanks!
a follow up on this wouuld indeed be great!
Thanks, Hope see more advanced feature later.
Got it, thanks!
This reply isn't a rebuttal to the message in your video, but my situation may apply to some of your viewers.
A traditional hard-wired purpose-built security system was installed in my home when it was built in 2011. As home automation matured, I decided I wanted to expose the security system to automation and ran into a roadblock. The original system couldn't do that so I replaced it with another purpose-built traditional security system that could. I now have automatic arm/disarm through the integration of my HA system and free location services on our smartphones. I can use time of day, or modes, to arm/disarm if I choose. I still have a rock-solid alarm system that is fully independent of my HA system so a bug-inducing software update to the HA system doesn't threaten home security monitoring. I don't have to worry about challenges and idiosyncrasies of wi-fi, or Zigbee/Z-Wave technologies. I get home security alerts on my smartphone and am my own monitoring service, and sadly that was tested a year ago when I received a fire alarm notification while away from home. Thankfully, that was a false alarm due to a power outage/surge that triggered the whole-home, wired, fire alarms to trigger. I called the local fire department, and they dispatched a truck. I unlocked the house, and they did a thorough check before I could arrive.
Hey Lewis I do something similar with the auto arm, I just have a group for the family members so if any is home, the group state is home etc, and I also have a condition set to say if all alarm sensors (group once again) are inactive for 2 minutes and family group is not home then arm… works like a charm :)
Good idea Riaan, there is only two of us to worry about but can see for more that would be useful! Thanks for sharing
I am also curious about this. I checked the suggested keypad but it seems like I need to pay a lot of money for the privilege to buy just the keypad. This is unacceptable for me.
@@EverythingSmartHome correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't an easier way to accomplish this part is just do a trigger on zone.home < 1 ? this is how i've been doing my auto AC turn off. faster to script, cleaner to maintain. And I just do zone.home > 0 to turn the AC back on.
Very clever sneaking your teaser in, keep up the amazing work!
Haha thanks Michael!
This is the video I have been looking for! Excellent easy-to-follow presenting style. Many thanks.
I've been hoping for this video for a while now, thank you so much for doing it! An advanced video to show ways to build on it would be fantastic!
Nice, thanks for watching!
Can confirm on the Aqara contact sensor. They are BRILLIANT. There's a video out there comparing contact sensors, and the end result was: Not even going to discuss the others, just get the Aqara. It's absolutely worth it to just get a Zigbee USB stick if you don't have a Zigbee network yet and use the Aqara contact sensors.
Can't yet confirm on the Aqara motion sensor, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's equally awesome.
Yep it's a tank!
I’m thinking I could buy an actual Honeywell Vista or GE Interlogix security panel, (I’m not sure if these are thing in the UK as I live in America.) and have all the wired sensor inputs on the central panel instead be wireless Z-Wave relays, So when a door is opened or a motion sensor is triggered, the home assistant system could receive and repeat that signal and activate the corresponding Z-Wave relay on the central panel. Then I could possibly reverse engineer the keypad bus for the panel and create my own wireless keypad interface for the panel that I could program into home assistant. Essentially what I mean is to install a traditional security system, just retrofitted to be wireless and controlled with home assistant. This way monitoring companies can still hook up their communications equipment to my system since it’s a traditional panel their used to working with.
Checking out alarmo now. It took me a while to work out how to roll my own using the built in alarm panel. Thanks
I suggest to use a time pattern (i.e. every 1 minute) to trigger if alarmo is on or off, because I had a situation where I was home but my wifi signal is sometimes weak in one room. Then Alarmo gets activated because I was not connected to my wifi for some time. But here is the thing: If my phone re-connects with the wifi, Alarmo is still armed and won't change its armed status. But when I set a time pattern as a trigger, it checks i.e. every minute if I am home or not and than changes to the correct armed/disarmed state.
P.s. At least the 'from home' section should not be selected as trigger like in the video because then only the state changes when I was connected to the wifi and disconnect but not vice versa. Pretty good video though. Helped me a lot to get an insight.
I love alarmo. Have been using it more or less since Niels released it. I am doing all my automations in node red rzthe than in alarmo as I want advanced stuff ^_^
For example when a camera detects motion it takes a picture but I'm giving the person in the house 30 seconds to disable the alarm before I send our phones a notification with that picture.
I also built a state machine like automation that determines what mode the alarm should be in based on our locations, Google calendar, etc etc.
Nice one, good job!
Looking forward the follow up! Inspiring video! Thank you for this!
Thank you for watching 😄
Unsolicited suggestion: For the lights when the alarm goes off save the current state of the lights as a temporary scene and then trigger a specific scene you've made for the alarm being triggered. Then on disarm trigger the prior temporary scene to restore the lights back to the way they were before the alarm went off.
Yeah this is what I already do - works well!
Congrats to 100k subscribers Lewis!🎉
Thanks so much! Appreciate the long time support!
If you already have a tablet used as a kiosk then adding an alarm panel card (a keypad card, really) to it to control the alarm would be free and more convenient and would look better than a dedicated hardware keypad that you have to buy and install.
Sure, that's why I demonstrated adding to the dashboard 😅 I prefer physical keypad personally but both are options
Love the video, would be cool to also see a local ran camera and smart doorbell system! Would up the home security level to a max!
Nice job Lewis, really Great Video! A great way to make what you already have even more useful. While I am not ready to implement them yet, I would love to see some of the more advanced features you talked about as well.
Thanks Fred, appreciate it!
Smarthomejunkie did a good video on this recently as well.
Home Assistant has a lot of features that lean toward a basic alarm system. Especially with triggerID's and able to do conditions and actions based on TriggerID's, it is just made so much easier now. I like the cusom component you are using. It really does make it easier, though I do prefer not using HACS. It's a little more work, but all can be done with standard automations :). Great tutorial video though. There are so many different ways to do these sort of things
There is indeed many different ways to do things - I used to use regular automations to do it for about 2 years so yeah does work good, just a bit more work!
Sods law Alarmo wasn't around when I wanted mine so my solution was a Tuya alarm with 433MHz sensors, so bought this and pulled the sensors onto HA with a SonOff 433 bridge.
plus side 433MHz sensors and detectors are dirt cheap
problem with a large number of smart alarms is the lack of an outdoor powered siren.....I know some do...Boundry being one...and Somfy one has a battery based one...which is a terrible idea...luckily home assistant has allowed me to make my Eufy Floodloght cam my outdoor alarm siren.....
Add some zwave dead bolts to it so you get notifications on them being unlocked, and maybe some way to quickly visually indicate the status of all door, window and lock sensors. Those innovelle switches look like they would be great if you can get your hands on them.
Keep them coming Lewis. Always enjoy your videos.
Appreciate you always taking the time to leave comments and supporting 🙏
Awesome video! Definitly would like to see the advanced setup.
Got it, thanks! 🙏
Same!
Going to the link for the Develco Siren, I found that you can't actually buy a single item on the site.. They insist on giving you a customised package with the gateway and everything... Is there any where else that I can buy just the alarm? With an existing HA setup, there is no need to buy other stuff...
Right when i wanted to make my own smart home alarm system. Thank you 👍
Enjoy Vincent! 😎
Awesome video the ring keypad v2 is zwave and only $49 usd can you see if you can set that up and exclude if needed on home assistant
Perfect, the last of my sensors just came in on the day that I stumbled upon this video.
ESPHome does have support for fingerprint readers so it is possible to use a fingerprint sensor for enabeling and disabeling the alarm system.
One of my earliest videos is about integrating a fingerprint reader :D
Would love a more advanced tutorial! I opted out of getting an alarm installed just recently because of the monthly expenses and everything running on their cloud.
As always informative video, thanks Lewis
I have been using Alarmo for awhile and it is working great, maybe an old table (if there is a one) showing HA dashboard besides exit door instead of the keypad save some money 🤑
Tip for automation condition use group of all the inhabitants and its state will be away if nobody home otherwise it would be home
I'd love to see advanced setup. I'm still only learning what HASS can do and seeing it in action is way better than to browse actual forums for ideas.
Thanks - coming up!
The IKEA Tradfri motion sensors are quite good and very inexpensive.
I’m using two of the Aqara for sensors on my garage doors, and I agree they work well. One thing to be aware of…they have temperature sensors built in, but I find they read a few degrees too warm.
Wish the “easy” mode didn’t require installing HACS. I tend to stick with the add-on store, so there are a number of things I’ve just skipped due to the HACS dependency.
I think the temperature sensors built into them are device temperature sensors rather than air temperature sensors
@@EverythingSmartHome That makes sense...thanks for the reply! Learn something new every day!
Great video. I have my arm / disarm with no PIN as I did not want a keypad. It is just a button on the app, which made it easier for the wife/kids. I also used your automation for arming the alarm as everyone always forgets. Please do the advanced video. P.s I was also your 1000 like on this video. Love your work ❤
I was thinking about this recently too. I normally don’t mind spending a bit of money on quality stuff. But £75 for a siren seems a bit expensive. Keypad I personally could easily do without. But am on the look out for a siren/ say half that price though.
I agree the price is quite high, it is possible to find them cheaper and I have before, I just kind find it right now unfortunately!
Amazing video! I learnt the GPS stuff, interesting!
Glad you enjoyed it 🙏
This is on my list of things to do. Thanks for pointing out that that there are zigbee keypads. I was already aware of the Sirens and I have my eye on a ZWave smoke detector. Now the hunt is on for one of those keypads that is a little more reasonable. Converting to CAD makes the price even more intimidating. Good job as usual Lewis it has been really great to watch you and your channel grow.
Good luck on the hunt - thanks for supporting 🙏
Where can you purchase develco products? I found the product on their website but no option to purchase
Awesome video. I wanted to setup an alarms system for the longest time the manual way. Really glad I put it off for so long and saw your video first. Also would be really interested in some advanced stuff.
Thank you, hope it helps
And you should add a siren and ups - incase they interrupt your power first
Nice video! I have been looking at replacing my smoke and heat alarms with 'smart' ones for a while. But i have been looking at wired ones since the housr is already wired for them. The only one i have found so far are the nest ones, but you can't really interact with them outside of he nest app and i don't really like the idea of relying on 3rd party. i do like the idea of using the smoke alarm as intruder alarm speakers though...that's brilliant. Looking forward to the advanced video.
Plus one for the advanced stuff!
Love you videos :)
Great vid as always, and I recently followed a tutorial to build a circuit integrating my Honeywell alarm to HA. I enjoy having disarm when I arrive home, but see issues with auto-arming, such as if you leave a housekeeper or someone else working at your home.
Cool - can you share the tutorial?
I would love for you to help me get my light strips in the kitchen to go red and blue like yours in this video and also my hue lights to alternate Red Blue when a alarm is triggered or in my case when the panic button is pressed.
Super nice - I just did it first time before summer holidays and it worked well. However, instead of buying sensors for 20+ GBP I built them myself on ESP32 so the total cost was close to nothing. One can also create actions for the cameras at home (if there is any) to i.e. start recording or take a snapshot - much lighter than motioneyeos I believe. Anyway, motion sensors are known to false positive alarms - at least that is what I noticed - even the original Aqara has this issue.
Nice - motion sensors don't have false positives, at least good quality ones. The inexpensive ones people usually use on esp32s are very prone to false positives, but good quality ones never falsely trigger (like the one we are using in the upcoming sensor)
@@EverythingSmartHome Before I deployed bunch of my DIY motion sensors, I bought Aqara one and I put them together in one place: imagine - both were triggering false positives, even the one for so much money ;-)
Love this video! Looking for this kind of solution for a while
Hope it helps Sven 😄
Hi Lewis can u do a video how to link frient keypad with alarmo? Tnx 🙌🙏
Great video. Lewis!! I need to get started on this, for sure, and your video has given me the energy to get going. I already have lots of the components. Quick question before I've been able to dive in..does Alarmo support a media player as a destination for a notification (or) can I have Alexa make an announcement if an alarm is triggered?? Thanks! Oh, and I'd love to see more videos targeted at advanced capabilities as well as more alarm-related devices. Oh, one more question...does the cell phone home/away simply get triggered when your phone goes off the home wifi?? What if you (for some reason) turn off your phone?? Thanks, again!! ~Frank
It can indeed yeah, I play TTS notifications as part of my alarm too!
Thanks for watching!
Great video, :-) Still waiting for the advanced follow up video...
Thank you sooo much for this great Video. I would like a more advanced video that shows how to integrate the Develco keypad with Home Assistant and do you recommend any NFS Tags that I can use/integrate with the Develco keypad?
Super nice tutorial ! I followed it to activate my alarm when both are leaving. Is it possible to also deactivate it when at least one of us is coming back home ? Are there any possibilities to make the siren (Heiman) beep when delay time is running ?
I always like you video, and I have learnt so much from your videos. Thanks
Great video, lots of useful information! Now I think that having a smart home alarm is actually a must-have. I have small additional info cause I think that a great app for facility maintenance is SIM-ON, it’s worth knowing 😊
Thanks Laura!
Another great video! Thanks!
Great video. I’d like to see more about how to integrate a keyboard into the alarmo system. Thanks..
Thanks!
14:20 group is a simpler method. Or using the count of the zone.
Great video. I'm currently setting this up for a new house and I'm hunting for a good physical keypad, do you have other suggestions?
I’m moving over from Ring and have the keypad working with alarmo via Zwave
really good one
Thanks for the Alarmo tip! I've a similar setup with Aqara motion sensors & contact sensors and the Develco siren and keypad. I am however struggling with the setup of the keypad. As of now, I can only get it to use the default code. An explanation on how to change this would be highly appreciated!
Loved it, lewis! Looking forward to the advanced video
Thanks for this really helpful video. I've used it to get up and running on Alarmo, amazing! I have a Hive homeshield keypad that was recognised by ZHA in Home Assistant, how can I go about integrating it with Alarmo to input the arm and disarm pin codes, would be great to see a video on that!
Another great vid!👍👍
Thanks, appreciate it!
Great video👍, thanks. If I have HAOS on a dedicated NUC, where I can find Alarmo add-on as I only see video talking about HACS way to download it. Or It should be found only through HACS only?
Is is possible to set / change the users alarm code with an automation / MQTT? Excellent video Lewis!
Did you ever make a more in depth video for this?
To track people leaving home, couldn't you use the count of the Home zone and check if it becomes 0?
hi lewis, great video as always. how have your develco devices held up please? would you still recommend all of them? or have you found an alternative you like better? should I hold off for matter support?
Advice needed…not tech savvy at all. Want door, window & leak sensors and something that announces when doors/window opened or an alarm. Is there something you suggest that I could buy and set up quickly that’s reliable? I’ve been told to have a local set up rather than WiFi but that confuses me. Have you heard of yolink or should I purchase aqara devices? If I buy all devices from same company, I could just purchase their hub correct and that’s all I’d need?
How do you tell an IKEA Tradfri RGB lightbulb to turn red on alarm state? Or to go through some programmed cycle of on and off etc? It seems all HA offers in the UI is to power on or off a tradfri build in automations (while the lamps card in the dashboard allows color change, dimming etc).
I’m thinking on purchasing the develco keypad. How easy was to integrate it with home assistant? And how to link it to alarmo?
i created a binary sensor for when everyone is not_home. Create it once and not have to have so may conditions. You can keep expanding the tracker portion. If everyone is not_home the sensor turns off and the alarm arms. if one person is not_home the sensor stays on
binary_sensor:
- platform: template
sensors:
people_home:
value_template: >-
{{ is_state('device_tracker.', 'home')
or is_state('device_tracker.', 'home')}}
Hi is the Develco keypad RFID reader exposed to home assistant so you can use it to read tags in home assistant
thanks for the video! Are there any smart locks you'd recommend?
I am a big fan of Kwikset Z-Wave locks. They are reasonably priced, and they can be rekeyed very easily. As a side effect of the easy of rekeying, they are virtually impossible to pick (I've had to call a locksmith to open some dumb versions of this lock).
I’ve always debated whether to set an alarm by location or a pin code and which one would be quicker to activate and more secure 🤔 how do you find it by location?
You could always implement both at the same time 😅
@@EverythingSmartHome yeah good idea! Then if you forget to arm it it’ll still arm by location, great plan!
Hey! great video as always! One question ... at 14:04 why did you go with 2x Not Home and not with 2x And Away?
Thanks! Because I'd you have zone and you go from home to work in one state then the automation won't run because you aren't "away"
Hey Lewis,
Looking to set this up but it looks like the Develco stufff isn't an option anymore :( did they just stop shipping it?
Many thanks, very interesting
Thanks Brian!
Fantastic to see this broken down into very approachable steps!
BTW, you may not know but the value of a zone entity is now the amount of people in the zone.
As such, it may be possible to simplify the auto-arming by using a trigger like the following:
```yaml
platform: numeric_state
entity_id: zone.home
below: 1
```
Keep up the fantastic work!
Thanks!
Of course you can use zone, I opted to show the other way because the zone functionality is a fairly recent addition which some people might not have updated too yet.
@@EverythingSmartHome Fairs. Speaking of updates, dayyyym that new automation UI is looking slicccck!
Can you share the script for your lights? I have hue bulbs and light strips I’d like to get the to flash blue and red like you do at the beginning
I was so excited to set this up, only to discover that Alarmo isn't an option in the integration menu any longer. Has this been replaced with something? renamed? Or is there another option that you would recommend (or anyone reading this comment?)
same! did you figure it out? I tried resetting and clearing lots of things but no luck
never mind it looks like the way HACS integrations work has changed? you now have to go directly to HACS to add integrations, not the HA settings->devices/integrations->add
Can this work if the power or wifi goes out?
Can I use nest cam motion detection?
Do you have any concerns with people using jammers with these wireless systems? I have heard of cases where wireless cameras have been affected using cheap wireless jammers.
Not had any problems no - like I say this is not as feature rich as a fully professional installed alarm system, but better than not having anything at all!
Anyone find anywhere else to get the develco keypad? That safely site won't let me buy it on its own.
I got the frient KEPZB-110. Zigbee2mqtt recognises it as the DEVELCO KEYZB-110. With blueprint 'Zigbee2MQTT - Control Alarmo via keypad' the keypad works with Alarmo.
Planning on getting the Develco / frient keypad. Can anyone confirm if this is compatible with ZHA?
Hey, im running ha on x86 pc. How can i use it as alarm, i have pc speakers plugged on the ha pc
Isn't it better to create a user group in yaml with all the persons of the household? All=false, so that if the last person leaves the house/geofence only then the alarm will be armed (and optionally when the first person arrives the alarm is disarmed) 👌
That's what I thought too. Or just use the state of zone.home.
So isn't the person going to cut the power before breaking in? So many people don't even have locks on their breaker panels. Flip of a switch... no power. No more home assistant. Security systems have battery backup. Someone might want to look into Abode home security or something like that. No monthly monitoring subscription required (it is available though). If your power is cut the hub will still be online with a wireless 4G connection. It will still be able to alert you. I'm wondering if there is a reasonable way to achieve this without such a system.
My breaker is inside of my house, the alarm would be going off by that point 😅
@@EverythingSmartHome I live in California. Seems like the majority of homes I've seen (including mine) have them on the outside IN FRONT of the fence / gate so the power company can access them? Seems really stupid to me.
Hi all,
I was not able to find out how to use the Keypad to arm or disarm the alarm. Anyone has a tuto
I developed a custom board to transform old alarm system in a smart one
My wife uses an iphone, I use an android. Will this system work for us both?