Support for Honeywell Ademco Vista

[agarden]

Hi,

I see that there are a number of ways to expose the Ademco Vista system to home automation, either through their Vista Automation Module (seems like overkill) or through the NuTech AD2DSB Adapter (preferred).

Perhaps I'm looking at the problem the wrong way but I wasn't able to find any drivers for these devices in the CQC native list.  So I guess I have two questions:

1) Is there a method enabled to interface with this Alarm in CQC already?
2) If not, can someone recommend a clever way to hack this together?

Thank you!


.a

[Dean Roddey]

Any idea where the actual protocol document for that Nutech adapter is?

[agarden]

As best as I can tell, it's here.

[Dean Roddey]

Once we get 5.1 out here in a bit I'll take a look at it.

[agarden]

Awesome Dean!

[agarden]

Dean,

Bumping this thread.  Any chance we can take a look at this now?  I'm making awesome progress on my CQC deployment... All I have left is security <ahem>, lighting and HVAC.

Warmly,

.a

[Dean Roddey]

The protocol for that adapter thing looks sad, even by alarm system standards, which are amongst the saddest of all typically. I can't even see how one could query the state of the alarm system. It talks about notifications it sends when things change. But if we can't query all of its state upon startup, then the whole thing is useless to us. And it really looks confusing and hacky. I'm talking about this one:

https://www.alarmdecoder.com/wiki/index.php/Protocol

which is the one for that adapter. I can't see that that VAM thingie is really what you would want. It seems more like some simple Z-Wave-centric automation box that also understands their own security system. I can't see that it exposes any of that for external control though.

[Dean Roddey]

There's a REST version of that adapter protocol here:

http://www.alarmdecoder.com/swagger/index.html

But it seems like the same stuff as the other one, just in an HTTP format. I see nowhere in there any way to get the current status of the zones and other information we'd need to populate the driver fields initially.

[agarden]

Crud.  OK.  I'm open to a total replacement... What is your current opinion on "best in class" that would work for my reasonably large installation?

[Dean Roddey]

The two common ones around here are the DSC-IT100 and the Elk M1. The M1 of course is more than a security system, so it would also provide a lot of extra potential functionality down the line, where the DSC is a straight security system. There's also the HAI Omni, but it's not as DIY friendly. There are V2 compliant drivers for all of those.

I'm not sure what the gotchas are wrt to replacing the Honeywell with one of those, and how much infrastructure would carry forward. Maybe some other folks here can speak to that.

BTW, I'm not saying absolutely that the thingie above is impossible, I just can't see how it would be given the docs available. Though, to be honest, for something already as complicated as a security system, it may be a good thing to have as few layers of translation between the controller and the system being controlled. Fewer moving parts is always a good thing.