Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

Posted on
Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:36 am
hamw offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

I also have an Ademco Vista panel and have the rs232 interface sitting in a box. But, I don't do perl etc. Do you think your neat scripts can be boiled down to where someone with little programming experience could use it?

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 9:20 am
mathewss offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

I just released new firmware for the AD2USB V2 Boards.

This new version has been months in the making and has some new features that I think will be very usefull here.

The one big feature is the ability to directly see activity from any 5800 wireless sensors in range of your alarms panels RF receiver. This will allow the home automation system to see motion and other wireless sensors raw activity regardless of how they are setup on the alarm. So if you want have a motion sensor trigger an automation response even if your system is armed in stay mode where the Ademco motions wont trip a zone you now can.

You dont even need to program your sensor into the panel if you dont want. Just go and get a 5800 wireless motion sensor and stick it in a room and your Ademco 5800 alarm reciever will pass that sensors info to the AD2USB even if you dont enable it as a device on your panel.

I use this new feature on my GUI program to show alerting visually for my house.

The new message from AD2USB looks like this
!RFX:0113124,a0

This is the prefix !RFX: then the serial number of the transmitter followed by a comma and the byte the transmitter is sending where each bit represents a state.

Image

struct SoftwareProfessional {
double salary;
long lunches;
float jobs;
char unstable;
void work;
short tempers;
};

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 10:16 am
asw24b offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

mathewss wrote:
I just released new firmware for the AD2USB V2 Boards.

This new version has been months in the making and has some new features that I think will be very usefull here.





Cool !

It is available for download somewhere ?

Thanks...

Mike

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 10:34 am
berkinet offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

mathewss wrote:
I just released new firmware for the AD2USB V2 Boards.

I use this new feature on my GUI program to show alerting visually for my house.

The new message from AD2USB looks like this
Thank you for a great update to the board. Did you get around to fixing the Mac compatibility problem with the MONO GUI?

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 3:42 pm
mathewss offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

This problem was related to how osx and mono deal with the com ports. It should not be a problem with Mono and sockets.

As I recall some program for osx or unix that would open the com port and turn it into a socket on a given port was a solution you where using?
I Don't recall the app but if you do let me know.

If so then the Mono GUI can now connect to a socket. If you can have a module / program that connects to the serial port and allow for a socket to connect and relay the same exact data it gets from the USB port to the socket and anything the socket gets back out to the USB port then the New Mono GUI will work perfectly on mac.

In the config just enable SocketClient and add the port and IP or Host name of the system connected to the AD2USB and providing this socket support.

I will be writing a simple relay program if one does not already exist for user who want to run this as a daemon on a system.

Re
Sean M

struct SoftwareProfessional {
double salary;
long lunches;
float jobs;
char unstable;
void work;
short tempers;
};

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 3:45 pm
seanadams offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

mathewss wrote:
As I recall some program for osx or unix that would open the com port and turn it into a socket on a given port was a solution you where using?
I Don't recall the app but if you do let me know.


ser2net. Can't vouch for it on OSX but have used it extensively in Linux

Or you can buy a ethernet->rs232 adaptor such as this one: http://www.gridconnect.com/net232.html

Those are handy because you can just install them at the rs232 device and use the LAN for your "backhaul".

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 3:53 pm
berkinet offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

mathewss wrote:
...As I recall some program for osx or unix that would open the com port and turn it into a socket on a given port was a solution you where using?
I Don't recall the app but if you do let me know....
The app was "socat." (There is also netcat for MacOS). Right now I have a perl script listening to the ad2usb output on a FreeBSD box, so it will be a while before I get around to trying socat again and testing the Mono GUI on my Mac. But, as soon as I get that up, I'll let you know how it worked.

BTW, I'd like to be able to share the ad2usb interface between a monitoring script AND the GUI and perhaps seanadams suggestion to buy a ethernet->rs232 adaptor is, in the end, the way to go.

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 4:18 pm
berkinet offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

seanadams wrote:
...Or you can buy a ethernet->rs232 adaptor such as this one: http://www.gridconnect.com/net232.html...
Or maybe http://www.gridconnect.com/ethernetusb.html, which is 2 port USB. On the same web page they also show a 4 port device. The 4 port box looks an awful lot like the one Kensington sells. With that box only one person can connect to a USB device at a time - thus defeating my idea of shared usage. I suspect the 2-port device is similar, but I will looik into it. I am pretty sure that socat will allow an interface to be shared... But, I'm not sure how the ad2usb would react to that.

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 5:10 pm
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

berkinet wrote:
seanadams wrote:
...Or you can buy a ethernet->rs232 adaptor such as this one: http://www.gridconnect.com/net232.html...
Or maybe http://www.gridconnect.com/ethernetusb.html, which is 2 port USB.


The thing about USB is it's not a trivial byte-stream like an RS232 port, so the host device needs to be running a special driver to talk to the USB->ethernet adaptor and make it appear to the OS as a USB device. Then the USB->serial driver is still needed to talk to that. It might work but I don't see an advantage.

In contrast an ethernet/IP to serial adaptor uses a vanilla TCP stream. That is totally OS agnostic and requires no drivers - only that the application be capable of talking to a socket.

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 6:53 pm
berkinet offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

seanadams wrote:
The thing about USB is it's not a trivial byte-stream like an RS232 port, so the host device needs to be running a special driver to talk to the USB->ethernet adaptor and make it appear to the OS as a USB device. Then the USB->serial driver is still needed to talk to that. It might work but I don't see an advantage.

All true. 'Cept the AD2USB's name says it all.
A year ago, on the Nutech forums, Sean M. wrote:
Looks like I have a run on serial requests...

I am just about to ship out a modified version that does serial. It required me to attach a MAX2332 chip on a second PCB I etched in my lab along with a modified firmware. So short answer is Yes. The problem is it eats up a lot of my time to do this custom modification and I cant do that unless I add to the price.

In the next revision of the board I have make this design change permanent and added an option board interface.

I am not sure how that worked out and if the new boards have serial support. Sean M.?

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 7:42 pm
seanadams offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

berkinet wrote:
All true. 'Cept the AD2USB's name says it all.


Haha I had a sneaking suspicion that was the point as I neared the end of my post, but figured as long as I'd typed all that I might as well hit submit and stick the foot in the mouth properly.

Posted on
Wed May 12, 2010 7:48 pm
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

By the way if you want to do the rs232 mod, there's a better trick which is to REMOVE the MAX232 from your adaptor and bypass it. Then you don't need one in the other device and they can communicate at CMOS levels. Still a non-trivial hack that requires cutting traces to wire it in, but you don't need an additional board to do the level conversion.

Posted on
Fri May 21, 2010 1:28 pm
berkinet offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

It's time for an update on my alarm interface project As mentioned previously in this topic, Nutech has released their version 2.0 boards as well as updates to their Mono GUI code to support an IP socket connection AND a port sharing application. Of these, the new port sharing app may be the key for most users.

This code, called ser2sock, connects to the ad2usb serial interface and then allows connections to be made to that device over the network. There is no limit to the number of simultaneous connections that can be supported. This means you can have an Indigo interface script, a virtual key pad, web interface, logging software, etc. all running at the same time. VERY COOL! The interface is two-way so clients can send panel events (key presses) and/or monitor panel messages. Right now you need to run ser2sock on a computer (MacOS, bsd, or Linux) but, Sean M. is working on getting ser2sock to run in a Linksys router.

So, in theory, using a program like MultiCom on the Mac (it can create a socket to serial connection), it is now possible to connect your alarm panel, via the ad2usb, to a Linux server and then, on the Mac, monitor the ad2usb with Serial-Bridge (Looks like applications for Serial-Bridge will never go away)..

I have updated the PERL alarm state machine to connect to the ad2usb over IP and I have also taken the ad2usb Mono GUI and converted it into an app to run on OS X.

Posted on
Fri May 21, 2010 1:48 pm
berkinet offline
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WANT AD

WANTED, Virtual web based Alarm Keypad

I am looking for sample code (HTML, Javascript, CGI, ?) to create a virtual alarm keypad, like this
keypad.png
keypad.png (62.96 KiB) Viewed 8919 times
on a web page. I have a number of examples that use Javascript to create little teeny buttons. I'd like to find a way to have large, (maybe colorful) buttons (like in the picture) that also indicate a keypress (click) response, I have a few examples of a Marquee that would serve to display panel messages, but if you have something that you think is really good, I'd love to see that too.

BTW, I already have an Indigo control page that creates a keypad, but I am not happy with how it works as a web page (outside of the Indigo-Touch client)

Posted on
Tue Nov 09, 2010 1:47 am
bbruck offline
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Re: Interface to an Alarm (Ademco, Vista, First Alert, etc)

berkinet -

I have an AD2USB happily wired into my iMac that runs Indigo, and love the MonoGUI interface.

It looks like I can try and integrate my Ademco system via the AD2USB via serial bridge, but I would lose the MonoGUI interface, OR I could use the scripts you are using without the serial bridge - is that correct?

Have you done any further work on this since the spring that might be posted elsewhere around here?

(My goal is to be able to monitor my wired and wireless ademco motion sensors and door sensors via Indigo to use them as triggers...)

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