House alarm which can be integrated?

[Siclark]

@unclebob1 sounds like you do very similar to me. The Vera detects via the texecom that external doors are open for more than a minute and turns off the heating, turns it back on when closed. I use Heatmiser Neo, 12 zones, for my heating, so the Texecom/Vera setup provides overrides to the normal programming of the heating, allowing for normal running of heating if ever the Texecom or Vera fail, I take them offline to amend, or screw up the programming on the Vera.
I do actually now have a Pi also connected to the Vera, that runs Siri Homekit so I can voice control the heating, Sonos, TVs etc.

Agreed, wired alarm PIRs are cheap compared to zwave ones and more reliable, have option of dual tech etc. One thing to point out to others is that they remain active and report motion irrespective of whether the alarm is armed or not. Wow, just reread your sensor setup! I just have one PIR to each room. You must have some pretty complicated logic to handle all those.

 

[ey143]

unclebob1
So are all your PIRs and door contacts, wired or wireless? That will be quite some wiring up if wired?

Siclark,
That is my ultimate dream trying to voice control my house and I have already been asking around if such a device exists. Closest I can find is Amazon's Alexa, so I might wait a bit longer. My Fibaro has a rubbish voice control feature using the app but it doesnt work properly and to be honest, I would rather have something in the room listening for my active command rather than having to press buttons etc - a bit Star Trek style. Do you know anything like it that exists? How does Siri homekit work?

Are you both IT programmers or something, they setups you both mention dont appear to be for the ordinary hobbyist?

 

[Siclark]

Definitely not a programmer. Just been adding to it over the last year. The Vera has plugins for both Alexa and Siri which both run on a Pi. Siri lets you run scenes on your Vera, so you have a TV on and TV off scene, and say "Hey Siri, turn on lounge TV" or "Hey Siri, turn off kitchen heating" and the Pi processes the voice command and sends the scene it to the Vera to run.
Alexa works much the same way but with a bit of a different set up I believe. Siri works from any phone in any room, and with a VPN, or AppleTV anywhere in the world but requires you to press a button on phone or watch. If an ipad is plugged in I think you can have it always listening for your voice. Alexa obviously limited to what room you are in but doesn't need button pressing. Sometimes though, its quicker to pick up a remote to do it than go through the pain of saying "Hey Siri" 3 times or same with Alexa.

There are also Vera apps that do voice recognition and are always on, and can be run on wall mounted android tablets and phones.

However, once people are past the tech sounding ability to control your house by your voice, most try to automate rather than just build more controls. ie my aim is to never need to ask Siri or Alexa to do anything to my heating or lights as it knows what is needed (ie heating normally off Mon-Fri 8-5 but if motion detected it realises we are at home and turns it on)

 

[ey143]

I suppose an old iphone or ipad could be the room fixture to achieve voice control, that is if the kids dont keep trying to use it. What if you dont want it to be dependent on a personal device,there is no zwave in the ceiling device like a smoke sensor type gizmo? I didnt know Alexa has a Rasberry Pi built into it...cool.

I agree about sometimes it being quicker...I guess the novelty quickly rubs off. But the show off factor must be huge

If I plan to use the Vera Edge+ with sensors around the house from Fibaro (quite costly at £40ish each from Vesternet), how could I hardwire one of those in the ceiling occupancy sensors? What would that need to connect to and what cable would I use?

 

[Siclark]

If you have always on voice control in your house then yes, your kids will use it. Voice recognition of individuals is a long way off. I think the only way to put something into the ceiling would be to have a mic there, running back to a Pi that does something clever.
Alexa doesn't have a Pi built in, you need a separate Pi running on the network to translate the Alexa commands to the Vera to enable control of the whole Vera house setup, rather than just the devices that Alexa natively supports.

Yes, fully setting up a house for motion sensors, especially zwave battery wireless ones is very expensive. Hence why people reuse their wired alarm PIRs.

For a ceiling PIR its same as any other, min 4 core alarm cable back to an alarm panel if also working as alarm PIR, otherwise Aeotec do battery zwave ones which can be recessed ceiling mounted

 

[unclebob1]

All my contacts will be wired, just as they were in my parents place...
Setting up contacts/pir's in the alarm is easy, just repetitive. (and cheap as long as im not paying someone to do it!)

Logic isnt in yet, but that's why i'm using the mysql db, i can add timestamps etc into it which will reduce the amount of logic needed (in my head at least), eg calculating 20min time is simple as the last time the PIR was activated, the timestamp for the pir in the db will also be updated. Also means i can have multiple feeds of data coming in to one central place, so multiple devices can then use it. And if one input device fails, no data loss, just rebuild/replace and off we go.

Then on the scripting side, i can have a program which runs through the table- if anything had a last update of more then 20min ago, set a flag.
The heating script can then decide to turn off/on a heating zone based on the flag of each pir.

Still working on the actual programming, but slowly getting there.
A simple heating timer is setup for each zone, temprature sensors (ws1820 if anyone is intrested) are being placed as i renovate.
Wiring for PIR's, door contacts etc is also being run as i renovate.

In terms of programming - i have a background in IT, but am learning to program as i go. Lots of help out there if you have an interest in that sort of thing.
My aim is to be able to have a tablet on the wall, which can be used to override lights/temps etc but that bit is a long way off... just getting the basics working at the moment.

 

[Siclark]

Have a look at PLEG, which is the logic tool that does exactly what you are looking for in Vera. The Vera OS can actually be run on the Pi, doesn't need the hardware, but if you want to code it yourself as a fun project it might give you some ideas on how others have done it.

http://www.vesternet.com/knowledgebase/technical/kb-25

http://rts-services.com/Vera/Plugin/PLC/#Syntax