I wanted a visual indicator of SHM’s status, and couldn’t find anything that filled that need. I came across a hat for the Raspberry Pi called the Blinkt for $7, and figured it was worth a shot to see if I could cobble something together since I already had a Pi running VLC for BigTalker.
Here’s how it works:
- A SmartApp that exposes a REST endpoint for the SHM status, and can monitor the state of an alarm (it doesn’t seem possible to get an active intrusion alarm from the SHM API, but you can see what an alarm device is doing.)
- Python script that runs on the Pi to poll the SmartApp, and show the state.
For now, it shows a dim solid green light for a disarmed state, pulsing orange for stay mode, solid red for away, very bright flashing red and blue for an intrusion alarm, and blinking purple if it can’t connect. The colors aren’t configurable (yet) unless you want to hack on the python script.
This is not very well written, and I just got it working so if you want to try it out, expect some hiccups. There is only very basic functionality at this point with many other possibilities for indicating the state of various devices (like water sensors and so on.)
Getting the endpoint and OAuth token is a little painful, and I am working on something to help with that, but for now it’s a manual process, see the github page for a link to instructions (thanks to Jordan B aka LXXero for writing them up!) …
The code is here: https://github.com/frameloss/smart-blinkt