Probably one for the more tech-savvy audience, but thought it worth sharing.
In recent months, there has been a fair amount of development of an interface between Texecom Premier Elite alarms (with ComIP / SmartCom) and Home Assistant, a popular home automation platform. Home Assistant natively supports generic alarms (either via third-party integration with traditional, physical alarms) or via its own manual alarm, which allows you to create your own alarm using Home Assistant's numerous sensors, and whatever outputs you choose to drive.
I won't detail every part of the setup here, but suffice to say the instructions that can be found here are more than clear enough to get it all setup and there's also an excellent support thread, to be found here. Probably took me about 30 minutes to get it up and running on my system, with a good chunk being to work out how to get the SmartCom up and running in the first place, but once it was up and working, it sprang to life with no further messing about.
So, what does it look like when done? Well a sample integration displays zones a bit like this:
(and the zones states change real time, so it's quite cool to stand with the Home Assistant app and open and close a door and watch them update!)
You can also view the current state of the overall system, or by area. e.g.
...which you can then arm (or part set) through the app...
...so you can see in real time what the current state of the system is.
Obviously, there are numerous triggers which you can use to fire off other actions based on events from the alarm, e.g. intruder, or a given zone changing state. One of my favourites is to turn on *all* of the lights in the house when the alarm goes off at night, which would certainly make an intruder think twice about hanging around! Or how about alerting if the alarm is not set when there's nobody at home? Dead easy!
You can also do other, non-related tasks like alerting if someone has left the back door open for more than a couple of minutes (those with kids will probably well appreciate this!). For bonus marks, combine this with an external temperature sensor so it won't bother alerting if it's nice and warm outside.
Anyway, bit of a rambling post, but thought there might be some home automation fans who have a Texecom alarm that supports an IP connection and didn't realise just what awesome things they could do with it! It's worth noting that this is all pretty new, so I'd expect some bumps with more complicated configurations, but the developer seems quite responsive.
If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them if I can.
In recent months, there has been a fair amount of development of an interface between Texecom Premier Elite alarms (with ComIP / SmartCom) and Home Assistant, a popular home automation platform. Home Assistant natively supports generic alarms (either via third-party integration with traditional, physical alarms) or via its own manual alarm, which allows you to create your own alarm using Home Assistant's numerous sensors, and whatever outputs you choose to drive.
I won't detail every part of the setup here, but suffice to say the instructions that can be found here are more than clear enough to get it all setup and there's also an excellent support thread, to be found here. Probably took me about 30 minutes to get it up and running on my system, with a good chunk being to work out how to get the SmartCom up and running in the first place, but once it was up and working, it sprang to life with no further messing about.
So, what does it look like when done? Well a sample integration displays zones a bit like this:
(and the zones states change real time, so it's quite cool to stand with the Home Assistant app and open and close a door and watch them update!)
You can also view the current state of the overall system, or by area. e.g.
...which you can then arm (or part set) through the app...
...so you can see in real time what the current state of the system is.
Obviously, there are numerous triggers which you can use to fire off other actions based on events from the alarm, e.g. intruder, or a given zone changing state. One of my favourites is to turn on *all* of the lights in the house when the alarm goes off at night, which would certainly make an intruder think twice about hanging around! Or how about alerting if the alarm is not set when there's nobody at home? Dead easy!
You can also do other, non-related tasks like alerting if someone has left the back door open for more than a couple of minutes (those with kids will probably well appreciate this!). For bonus marks, combine this with an external temperature sensor so it won't bother alerting if it's nice and warm outside.
Anyway, bit of a rambling post, but thought there might be some home automation fans who have a Texecom alarm that supports an IP connection and didn't realise just what awesome things they could do with it! It's worth noting that this is all pretty new, so I'd expect some bumps with more complicated configurations, but the developer seems quite responsive.
If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them if I can.