Yesterday I completed the wall mount for my SmartThings ADT panel:
I used the following parts to run low voltage wire in the wall and the attic. This was my first time running low voltage cable in a wall, so I believe others may benefit from a list of the tools I used to mount it:
- 2GIG AC1 Power Supply for $17.99
- 100 ft. 18 AWG 2 conductor CL2 rated in-wall speaker wire for $14.50
- 4 light-duty drywall anchor screws
- Woodboring auger drill bit to drill a hole in in the top plate to make a hole for the wire from the attic into the wall
- Hole saw to cut a hole in the drywall
- Gardner Bender 25-Count 1/4-in Plastic Low-voltage Cable Staples for $2.58 to secure the wire run in the attic
- Southwire fish tape ($11.98 for 25 foot) to run wire from the attic down to the hole in the wall
- Cable pull lubricant and electrical tape for getting the fish tape through small openings in the top plate
I plugged the power supply into an existing outlet in my attic. I secured it to the outlet with the bracket and ziptie included with the AC1 power supply.
Many thanks to @Mdterps to providing a guide for selecting the correct in-wall wiring and power supply. I used the 2GIG GC3 installation manual to verify panel wiring and wall mount instructions.
I’m sticking with my SmartThings ADT setup despite the system no longer being manufactured. I recently used a successful DIY solution to get ADT monitoring working again involving manually sending a DELETE XHR request to ADT APIs (!) with Firefox dev tools.
For the first 9 months, a bug prevented me from querying the alarm system’s status, which required a factory reset and starting over from scratch to workaround.
I believe Samsung should take responsibility for issues which could be managed by a better relationship with ADT. Because of this failure, there are terrible customer experience issues:
- ADT staff believing my ADT Canopy account number isn’t a valid ADT account
- ADT staff claiming I paid Samsung for monitoring service, not ADT
- ADT staff claiming I never paid them despite how I paid $31.99 the previous day
- ADT directing me to a special “Canopy support” 800 number which doesn’t work
- ADT directing me to email billing@adtcanopy.com for billing issues, which is no longer a valid email address (!)
- ADT never responding to billing inquiries made to adtbill@adt.com provided by phone reps
- ADT forwarding me to Samsung as the “correct department” for adtcanopyportal.com issues and Samsung explaining they cannot support adtcanopyportal.com (WTF)
- Samsung claiming monitoring issues are not their responsibility, despite selling a system which is specifically sold to work with paid monitoring
- Revoking SmartThings access from ADT will cause immediate plan cancellation without refund. This is dumb — I should be able to re-authorize SmartThings to start over at any time without penalty, giving people the tools to fix issues themselves.
No wonder only 600 monitoring accounts are still active!
I decided to hack my own solution to get monitoring working because I was tired of trying to call ADT or Samsung for help and ultimately have nothing solved. It was easier to fix things myself than to get on the phone with either of these folks. I was about to invoke a chargeback for monitoring service and decided trying to hack a solution would be less stressful than dealing with the chargeback.
I want to be an ADT customer, but they sure don’t make it easy.
While ADT and Samsung are rarely helpful for support, I highly value the control and integration possible in a DIY security setup. I do not recommend this system, but I hope my experience is helpful for the folks who are still here.
After the factory reset, I started to build out integrations based on the alarm status.
Thanks to others in the community including @Mavrrick58, @zcorneli, and @ethayer, I have the system integrated with a Iris v2 keypad for arm away, arm stay, and disarm functions with status LED. I have the system auto-arming when my door locks are locked from the outside and an external Honeywell 120 dB siren linked to the panel alarm.
If anybody is interested, I can share the modifications I made. Here are the SmartApps and DTHs I use and modify:
- [Released] ADT Tools 2 for Smartthings ADT alarm sytsems
- [RELEASE] Lowes Iris and XFinity CentraLite keypad DTH + Apps
- [RELEASE] Lock Manager
Finally, I also use Home Assistant, the ADT Tools 2 SmartApp, and virtual switches to integrate the ADT panel into Home Assistant. This allows me to arm and disarm my system from HomeKit.
I can ask Siri questions like “Is my security system armed?” or command “Arm my security system for stay,” which is really useful.
The integration simply uses Home Assistant automations to update the manual alarm control panel component based on status changes on the ADT Tools 2 virtual switches. When the component status changes, I have Home Assistant automations to push the ADT Tools 2 virtual buttons.
Hope this inspires folks with ADT panels to get the most value out of their investment! Happy to help others who want to hack on integrations like these.