I have a Siemens SPC 43xx alarm panel. It speaks X-10 - i.e. the documentation states “The SPC controller provides a dedicated serial port (serial port 1[RJ45]) for interfacing directly with standard X10 equipment.”
So my question is can I use the CM11a plugin (or similar?) to receive X-10 messages (for instance alarm-on/alarm-off) and execute scenes accordingly? The SPC has triggers that can execute X-10 messages, so the question is more if the Vera/CM11-plugin will be able to understand the messages sent from the SPC in such a set-up?
I have been looking into doing exactly the same thing but with a Napco Gemini alarm control panel, for which a choice of both Zwave and X-10 interfaces are available.
The problem is that these alarm panels and their associated “home automation” interfaces are designed to form an integrated alarm and home automation system - and they are not designed to communicate with another home automation controller like Vera. They will send out commands to Zwave/X-10 devices (to turn on and off lights for example) but not information such as alarm controller status that can be picked up by another system on the Zwave/X-10 network like Vera. From the research I’ve done so far, it seems the best you can do is to pass status from your alarm panel to Vera indirectly, for example: Configure a scene on the alarm panel that turns on an X-10 controlled light when the panel is armed, then use a Zwave sensor that detects power is being applied to the light to send that information to Vera. It would work, but not very elegantly.
It is my understanding that the protocol used for direct communication with the Seimens control panel is proprietary, so this (more elegant) solution is not an option.
Well, I can’t speak for Gemini which I don’t now, but in the case of Siemens SPC it actually says that it support X-10. Also the SPC is only an alarm and does not try to be anyhing more and thus seems to have no commercial incentive to be propriotary in that regard.
The SPC has an elaborate triggering system that can be programmed to send all sorts messages to among other things to X-10.
Anyway, I will know more when I get to test it. My concern was more if the setup described will work with anything else than CM11 which the plugin was created for. I don’t know the X-10 protocol and how generic it is?
I found some documentation for this panel, probably the same docs you have. My guess is that they expect you to connect the serial port to an X10 TW523 or PSC-05 serial to power line interface so that the alarm panel can operate X10 devices. The CM-11a plugin will not work in that case. You would need to understand the TW523/PSC-05 serial protocol and probably write a new plugin to decode those commands coming in the serial port. If you had a real CM11a and you hooked up the alarm panel to a TW523/PSC05 as designed, the CM11a would pick up the commands sent by the alarm panel. But that’s a long way around.
I guess my question would be, do you currently use X10 for other things, or are you just trying to use the X10 interface to talk to vera only? If you aren’t using X10, then there might be a better way to accomplish what you want. I just briefly scanned the 295 page doc, but the panel does have an ethernet interface and it has the ability to communicate with it through that interface (or at least obtain status). So you might be better off with a plugin designed for that alarm panel that talks to it over ethernet.
No, I don’t use X-10 for anything as I have no X-10 devices (only Z-wave). I’m only trying to figure out a way for the SPC to tell the Vera about it’s state. As a minumum I want to know if the alarm is armed or not. If possible I could also see interesting applications of getting info from motion sensors connected to the SPC, but that is not my main motivation.
In regards to the Ethernet connection. So far I’ve not figured out a way for the SPC to send state info using that route or as a 2nd best to poll state through the ethernet. That would indeed be interesting. My guess is however, that this is not possible for security reasons, but I’ll need to look into that in more detail.
Actually I have a document with the protocol, but it’s kind of greek to me with all the talk of timing things just right. I tried to attach it to this message but it’s slightly too large for the forum. I’ll send you a link via PM that you can download it from.
The ethernet port allows you to bring up the webserver pages for the alarm panel which allow you to configure and see status of items I would imagine. Whenever you have access like that, then someone could write code that can retrieve those pages and parse out the information they are interested in.
Again, I didn’t look at the docs completely, but there might also be some sort of command line interface to the panel as well either via ethernet (telnet maybe?) or the serial port.
Bruce
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