I just bought one of the Vera Lites in the promise that it would support my Ademco 128BP alarm panel.
Well, the good news is that this is an interesting piece of home control hardware. The bad news is that any existing support for the Ademco panel “needs some work”.
i had purchased the Ademco 4100SM serial interface a while ago thinking i’d eventually get around to writing an interface for it. I choose it over an Ademco ECP bus connection because the ECP bus runs rather slowly when there are a number of devices on it and multiple zones.
Having tried the existing implementation of the Ademco RS-232 plug-in, I’ve found it a bit lacking:
- It is currently “hard-wired” in the code to support only the 128BPF panel (the commands are different for the different panels - see the Ademco documentation).
- The 128BP panel does not support the command to return the names of the zones. So the existing plug-in doesn’t work.
- Since my alarm system has a lot of zones (50 plus), i really don’t want 50 separate “widgets” - makes a mess in the “dashboard”.
- The 4100SM only talks 1200 baud (see the documentation). The existing plug-in is hardwired to 9600 baud. So far, i’ve only been able to get it work by using an Ethernet to serial converter.
So, I’d sure like to hear from anyone who has really gotten this to work. I’m slowly rewriting a new plug to make this work as i have time to figure out how to code in this new environment.
BTW - The RTCOA thermostat plug-in works great - it was worth the $180 for this device to simply get the outdoor temperature displayed on the thermostat console!
(The “insure this is a human” security for this forum is rather ridiculous. I can’t read about 9 out of 10 of the Captchas…)
Bill