Hey Everyone,
So I’ve been looking at replacing this (now) disappointing 1990’s alarm system with something much nicer. Obviously smartthings paired with some door sensors would be nice, but that would end up being expensive, and my 90’s system still has sensors on all my doors. After a bit of digging i found this:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=15883
Which is a super nice starting point for a guide with some basic code for reading the original zones on my old system. I’ve had a raspberry pi lying around for some time now and this seems like a fantastic use for it. So far i’ve made some nice progress. below i’ll update this as i go along.
Once everything’s done i’ll share my code. Im sure lots of people here have these old alarm system’s that they are no longer using.
Day 1: Plugin and Setup
After turning on my old system manually to find some of the connections are still jivving, i began by ripping out my old system and labeling each zone (2-6 with zone 1 being smoke detector - which was long replaced by a nest protect).
I didn’t take a picture pre- setup so here’s the old board:
and here’s the new (still messy) setup:
After a modifying the python script in the initial raspberry pi thread, i’ve managed to connect everything together and low and behold i get messages when my doors open and close! so far i’ve identified that two of the original zones are working. sadly one of my doors seem to be broken and does not report with the rest of the system, but 1 out of 5 ain’t bad!
Next steps: building a web server api to hold the open/close data.