My wife want to add an audible alarm for when the front door opens, since we’ve got small kids. It’d just be some extra peace of mind for her in case one tries to go outside. However, she doesn’t want to get woken in the morning when I go to work or jump out of her skin when I get home. So, what’s the best way to temporarily disable a scene in Vera?
I’ve looked a little a the Zipato RFID keypad, that’s not a terrible idea, but we don’t have a good place to mount it outside (and we’d probably want two of them, one on each side of the front door, unless the RFID could read my tag through the wall which I highly doubt). I’ve thought about the various keyfob zwave remote, like the Aeotec 4 button fob. That might work when leaving, but not when coming home since it won’t reconnect to the network fast enough I don’t think.
I’m also in the process of adding a MySensors network to our Vera, so I could just make a couple simple one-button boxes with mysensors nodes in them and stick them inside and outside the front door (out of kid reach, obviously) and have a press on the button disable the alarm for 30 seconds or something.
Is there a better option I’m not thinking of? I’m sure I could also use a phone app (I’ve played a little with both the Vera app and Imperihome, but don’t use either regularly) and do something there, but that seems like a bit of extra hassle (pull out phone when my hands are often already full, start the app, press a button in it, etc).
I would use the Eaon Key Fob or minimote. But you aren’t going to get any feed back that it worked. Maybe add a EZMultiPli near the door to signal the siren override is on, (but you need to be able to see it from the outside when coming in to which is tricky). Just make sure to turn off polling entirely from the Vera once you include fob in the network and you should be fine.
For the scene, I would use a timer app like the Program Logic Time Switch, and set the count down to like 1 minute, and add a conditional statement to your siren trigger to not go off when the timer is on.
Is your phone an Android? (Now that imperihome is available for IOS it’s no longer safe to assume it is…) If you have an android that has NFC, you could use a combination of tasker and autovera or imperihome. For leaving in the morning, a quick tap on the NFC tag would fire the tasker action that uses autovera or imperihome to run a scene on vera that disables the alarm then with a 60 second delay re-arms it. The NFC tag can be put anywhere…by where you keep your keys for example. Just build in a slightly longer re-arm delay to make it more convenient as you leave the house in the morning.
Coming home, you could have a tasker profile/action that is triggered by the condition of connecting to your wifi network (assuming your signal is strong enough…easily fixed by a bridge in the garage).
There is, of course, more than one way to do this. You could use vera plugins like PLEG and vera proximity with some specific conditions and a couple perimeters setup to ensure you are tracked properly in terms of not being home and/or arriving by entering the outer perimeter first then the inner one within a certain time period (Richard can help you out there). But, for leaving in the morning the NFC tag seems like the easiest solution.
Thanks ctguess - hadn’t even thought about the nfc route! Yes, wife and I are both on android (Nexus 5 and Nexus 4) so that’d work for both of us. By far the cheapest option for sure… and it’d help my wife remember to actually have her phone on when she leaves the house!
shallow - I’d never see that EZMultipli, and it’s a pretty cool looking combo device. Might have to dig deeper on that one. But are you saying taking the fob out of the house and coming home it’ll reconnect to the zwave network fast enough to work? Great point though on not having feedback. Worst case here is making my wife and kids jump when I get home from work. Leaving in the morning, there’s lights nearby I could make flash when the alarm is disabled to get feedback that way. They’re not visible from outside though. Although I could always put a zwave switch onto the front porch light… that might not be a bad idea anyway, other than the fact that that electrical box is way too crowded to fit a zwave switch into if I remember right. Might have to pull that switchplate off when I get home… although the biggest pain might be finding a proper switchplate, since it’s like a 3 or 4 switch box and that’d be the only leviton style switch in it.
GE/Jasco now makes a toggler style zwave switch, so you can use that and not have to deal with decora mix and match.
The battery powered zwave devices (like a key fob) just sleep all the time, they don’t care that they leave the proximity of the z-wave mesh and come back. When you press the button they they are just going to broad cast their signal to whoever they think is near by. Since the key fob and minimote are actually a z-wave controller, they actually know the entire network so work a little different than a sensor,switch etc. i use my minimote all over house and it is always pretty much instant.
However the phone option is probably a better one, and you might be able to set a notification on you phone or text message that the alarm was disabled as well.
The other option would be to have the siren on a delay so that when you come in, it doesn’t go off but warns you with a light on and off so that you try to disable it again.
Thanks, just found that GE 12727 switch. Still takes up a bunch of space in the box but would be nice to not have to switch coverplates.
And thanks for the info on the fobs. I’ll probably give that a try too. Found one of the aeotec 4 buttons fobs at my local microcenter as a clearance open box item, but the battery was dead, so I haven’t played with it yet.
hello.
I want to use a single nfc tag that change the house modus to Away/ Home. I’am using imperihome but you can only link a nfc tag to a Scene and not to a virtual switch.
But now I don’t know how I have to create a scene that can change to away or home?
Can somebody help me?
Add the appropriate line to you scene to change the mode in the luau section
Set Mode Night
luup.call_action(‘urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:HomeAutomationGateway1’, ‘SetHouseMode’, { Mode=3 }, 0)
Set Mode Home
luup.call_action(‘urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:HomeAutomationGateway1’, ‘SetHouseMode’, { Mode=1 }, 0)
Set Mode Away
luup.call_action(‘urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:HomeAutomationGateway1’, ‘SetHouseMode’, { Mode=2 }, 0)