@cjcharles Strangely this morning, I managed to add the child devices the same way I have been trying and they are now updated correctly. I will keep monitoring them.
Glad to hear it! I think there are some strange ST bugs at the moment as some other device handlers for other people have also been having problems.
Let me know if they resurface! Have a good Christmas otherwise!
Merry Christmas!
cjcharles, thanks for sending the preconfigured Wemos chip. Until four weeks ago, I had never heard of Smartthings or Visonic. But with your clear instructions (and the not so clear Visonic manual) I managed to install the alarm myself and the Wemos chip inside. Thanks to the chip and smartthings I can now successfully arm and disarm the alarmsystem away from home which was the main purpose of buying the ST hub.
But now I’ve read into Smartthings, I want to try to use the Visonic sensors for other things. I need to create child devices for my sensors. I edited the DH for extra tiles (line 89 and lines 143-144). Then in the ST app when I press “refresh” and after 10s “configure”, nothing happens. I can see the 13 tiles for each zone and if I open the window or move before a motion sensor, I see the tiles react. But there are no zonenames visible, only “–”. If I then press “Create devices”, I am slowly getting zonenames, but only for the first five or six zones. If I delete the Visonic device and try again, I get sometimes more or less zones. I now have 8 zones out of the total of 13 zones:
For these 8 zones, child devices are created. Do you have an idea why not all the 13 zones get zonenames?
@Nightraver Glad to hear it! Yes I dont think Visonic get many points for naming/instructions/guides/… but I guess they hope you use a professional installer if you have a problem What they do get right is a really good reliable alarm panel (which is all that matters really!)
As for your problem… Did you add the extra sensors after first enrolling the Wemos? It can only pull zone names at the point of enrolling, but you might find a power cycle of the Wemos will force it to pull the updated zonenames.
If you have always had the sensors paired, can you please go to the IP of the Wemos and add getzonenames at the end of it. E.g.
http://192.168.1.20/getzonenames
If you paste that here that would be great.
Hello, sorry for the late respons. I tried some things but it didn’t work. I only get the 8 zones I posted above. I’m not sure if the sensors were enrolled before (auto) enrolling the Wemos as I installed it all at once. I tried several times to power down and power up the Wemos, but it gives the same result. Here you can see the getzonenames. I noticed that zoneid 7 is listed as a smoke detector while this is a magnet contact. I checked in my Powermax Complete settings but it’s correctly enrolled. Zonid 10 is a broken magnet contact which I removed and unenrolled. 15 and 16 are indeed smoke detectors:
{“namedzonesenrolled”:15,
“maxzoneid”:16,
“zones”:[{“zoneid”:1,
“zonename”:“Front door”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:2,
“zonename”:“Living room”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:3,
“zonename”:“Kitchen”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:4,
“zonename”:“Kitchen”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:5,
“zonename”:“Back door”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:6,
“zonename”:“Laundry room”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:7,
“zonename”:“Garage door”,
“zonetype”:“Smoke”},
{“zoneid”:8,
“zonename”:“Utility room”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:9,
“zonename”:“Basement”,
“zonetype”:“Magnet”},
{“zoneid”:10,
“zonename”:“Unknown”,
“zonetype”:“Unknown”},
{“zoneid”:11,
“zonename”:“Living room”,
“zonetype”:“Motion”},
{“zoneid”:12,
“zonename”:“Laundry room”,
“zonetype”:“Motion”},
{“zoneid”:13,
“zonename”:“Basement”,
“zonetype”:“Motion”},
{“zoneid”:14,
“zonename”:“Upstairs”,
“zonetype”:“Motion”},
{“zoneid”:15,
“zonename”:“Laundry room”,
“zonetype”:“Smoke”},
{“zoneid”:16,
“zonename”:“Upstairs”,
“zonetype”:“Smoke”},
]}
No problem if you don’t see the problem. I’m happy with the system as is, but it would a nice extra to use the PIR sensors in Smartthings…
That’s useful! Thank you for the post. Definitely a few things that could be causing problems, I’ll need a bit of tonne to check from my side but I expect it will be one of these problems:
- having gaps in the sensors can cause it confusion and extra ST processing since it could only deal with the gap in a fairly manual way. It may be better to have no gap if possible, though if you are about to replace one of the sensors then don’t bother shuffling them for this reason.
- it may be struggling because of the smoke sensors. I don’t have any of these so I’m not sure what messages Visonic actually sends and this may cause a problem. If the smoke sensors were at the end of the list it may improve things for now, again while I investigate.
- ST child creation has some issues at the moment and I guess it is possible that it is reaching an execution time limit, or unable to update that many tiles at once. Do you notice the status is correct, even if the name isn’t? I.e. It correctly shows the motion sensor activity.
One thing I am sure of, you have got the Wemos correctly paired and it has access to all information, hence unless you reorder the zones then you don’t need to restart anything again!
Your third point seems plausible because sometimes I get 6 child devices, sometimes 8…
I’m going to replace the defective sensor and I’ll let you know the result. It is indeed so that all the sensors, also the unnamed ones, show the correct activity.
I finally got around to setting this up today. It was fairly straight forward in the end, I can successfully arm/disarm the alarm from the SmartThings app but I can’t seem to get it to find the zone information. I’m pressing the refresh/configure buttons and nothing is happening, there’s just no zone info.
Could it be something to do with the fact that for some reason my zones have been set up weird? 1, 2, 3 are in use, then the next zone is set to zone 28 for some reason. I’m not quite sure how to change that zone to zone 4 either, I’ll have to look into that.
Edit: nevermind, I fixed the gaps and I’m still having the same issue. My zones are below.
{"namedzonesenrolled":4,
"maxzoneid":4,
"zones":[{"zoneid":1,
"zonename":"Front door",
"zonetype":"Magnet"},
{"zoneid":2,
"zonename":"Kitchen",
"zonetype":"Motion"},
{"zoneid":3,
"zonename":"Living room",
"zonetype":"Motion"},
{"zoneid":4,
"zonename":"Back door",
"zonetype":"Unknown"},
]}
It’s probably worth mentioning that the Unknown zonetype (Back door) is a Visonic Shock Sensor (door/window contact, model MCT-303). There’s no device handler for this - could that be causing the issue?
Here’s how my ST app looks
That’s useful. I’ll add some extra error catching on that and see if that fixes the unknown sensor. I will also see if Visonic publish their sensor types since that sensor type is not listed in the library that I use, though I assume it could be treated like a motion sensor (active or inactive). If I find the sensor list then you’ll need to update the firmware instead of just the ST device handlers.
@sacredshapes - Can you PM me the contents of your WEMOS_IP_ADDRESS/status result, since that will hopefully include the model information that I need in order to fix it on the Wemos side (feel free to block out your pincodes). Though Im working on a fix on the ST side for now anyway.
Will do that now, cheers.
Hi Cjcharles,
First of all thanks for your awesome work. Recently I bought a Wemos d1 board from you and tried to install it into my powermax express. On the powermax express main board can i still use the same positions for the RX and TX pins as shown in your instruction manual? My board looks like the one in post 92 by medic563. To power the wemos board i used power from the micro usb port. I can access the wemo board by Wifi, however it doesn’t work. When asking for the status, it says ‘not ready’. It also doesn’t show any zones…
Did I possibly use the wrong pins? Or is the micro usb power insufficient? Any idea?
Are you getting micro USB power from a separate USB adapter? That is likely to be a cause of broken comms as the voltages for the serial comms are then floating at unknown voltages.
Does arming work when you press on that button from the Wemos webpage? If not then try connecting ground on Wemos to ground on Powermax (this is not ideal and can cause other risks, so probably only a good idea for short checks). Otherwise I think I need to do some research to find a proper 9-12V power source on the express panel.
Hi cjcharles, arming doesn’t work either. I am thinking about cutting the existing power wire and splitting it into 2 power inputs for the powermax and the wemos. Could that work?
Can you confirm that the tx and RX pins are in the same position of the connection as on the powermax complete?
I am very invested to make this work, as I already have my home setup with a lot of visonic sensors.
Cutting the power cable has worked well for me, but the Complete uses a DC supply, I have a feeling the Express might use an AC supply. Make sure you treble check that first!
Some close up pictures of the pcb which are clear might help me guide you to find power on the panel itself (though not as good as some multimeter probing sadly).
Hi cjcharles,
The power adaptor itself is AC/AC 9v 700mah. There’s a picture of the PM express board in post 92. I’LL take some more tonight
Hmm, sorry that picture was good actually, I remember I just couldn’t find any likely sources of dc power! Does connecting the grounds together improve things? (In addition to the rx and tx)
The silly thing is 9V ac will convert to 12.5V dc and hence the actual Powermax Express will probably be using 12V dc (after some component losses), just apparently makes it difficult to access for other use! I can even see the circuitry converting to 12V dc, but from the pictures it’s hard to tell where you can connect to it!
Is the black connector at the bottom right (next to the two greenish capacitors) labelled? I imagine the voltage across the pins on the blue capacitors (on the left) is 12V (at least on one of them, if not both), but that would require soldering. Its hard from a picture!
I had some spare time today and decided to experiment some more. I still have the wemos connected to micro usb power and attached the ground cable. On the wemos however there are 2 gnd pins so not sure which one to use. Then i started thinking maybe I am using the wrong pins for rx and tx, so i switched them around. After a bit of messing around I managed to get some beeps out of the visonic when clicking on the arm home and arm away links in the wemos interface. So now it sounds like it is arming, but in reality it isn’t. So I am kinda lost now… 
I decided to make a picture of my powermax express and the wemos to show you how i connected it. Maybe you can give me some pointers.
I would suggest making sure to power the wemos board from the alarm panel, instead of the micro-usb, otherwise you have two separate power supplies and two separate grounds, which means that either the grounds are floating separate from each other, OR that you’re tying the two grounds through the WeMos, neither of which are good.
However, since there appears to be some activity now, it suggests that there is some level of comms going on at least. I’m not too familiar with the Visonic system itself, so would need to defer to @cjcharles or someone else more knowledgeable on the alarm system.
1 Like
Yup, we’re talking through some options. The biggest problem with this panel seems to be that is uses an AC power supply and there isnt easy access to 12V. But we’ll sort something out so that I can properly find a solution to this. Will follow up on this thread as soon as I have some hardware advice on this point - and will update the top post and Github.
There is a small chance that this board may suffer from the same problems as the Powermax+ which has terrible serial comms and hence why I have added the Arduino to sit between them - it can then process the serial data into something the Wemos can process. We will see!!