Having just gotten back from CES I toured both he Control4 booth and the z-wave alliance booth… One thing I saw in the Control4 booth was a nice Honeywell Alarm system fully integrated into the control4 (zigbee) system. There is no reason that a DIY group couldn’t have the same thing. I just bought the new GE Simon XT system with zwave support, but cannot see how to integrate. Also I saw the Square connect IR puck (just bought one as well) and really see full integration potential. I see that systems like Paradon and the old GE CADDX system are being worked, but it would seem like an alarm panel integration framework could be designed to easily add new alarm systems versus custom every time. Is anyone working on that and can I help? With the GE Simon system it includes color LCD wireless touch panels that could/should be able to used for zwave control with Vera… Being able to leverage motion sensors and door contacts for triggering Vera scene triggering would be awsome! ;D
We can standardize at the interface level, which is what the GE Caddx and Paradox do (but not the DSC just yet) but the inner communications protocol of each of these devices is vastly different so those will need to be custom per Panel.
That said, with an agreed upon standard interface we can have control points (iVera, HomeBuddy, SQRemote, etc) bubble up a standard UI presentation for common actions.
We need a few tweaks to the current interface, and there’s a Luup Dev thread for that. If you have coding experience with other panels then we welcome feedback there on Specific, structural changes to the existing interface in order to accomodate additional Panels (they all have their own compromises)
Thanks I will digg into the Luup dev threads. Got any good insight on where to find protocol specfics for GE Simon? I see that the Pardox integration leverages the printer output for the actual interface. It would be nice if they just started with an open API so that we could just grab the events and post them to some standard interface (XML, SOAP).
You’ll have to do a bunch of Google searches for that. It appears that a number of these vendors like to “hide” their Alarm Protocols unless you have keys.
I can only assume they’re ashamed of their designs, since there’s no other logical reason to stop integrators from, well, integrating… (tongue firmly planted in cheek)
I see that the Pardox integration leverages the printer output for the actual interface.Not quite. Their Home integration board serves two purposes, "[i]Printer output[/i]" (output-only, Parallel or Serial) for Auditing, and "[i]Home Automation integration[/i]" (bidirectional, Serial or USB-Serial). The Paradox Plugin uses the "HA" side of this interface board.
It would be nice if they just started with an open API so that we could just grab the events and post them to some standard interface (XML, SOAP).I suspect they consider this their secret sauce, so standardizing it would mean that people would "move" to using better/cheaper/newer panels easier if they did it. The "secret" HA protocols makes for better lock-in (or lock-out, as the case might be) 8)