Lights

[PeterJames]

Is anyone else using their alarm to control their lights and stuff?  In my last house I automated stuff and controlled it using Galaxy gold, but everytime I wanted to switch something on or off remotely I had to find an internet connection for my laptop or connect my lappy to my mobile. No suh thing as apps and 3g back then.

This house is far better my wife doesnt like all the tech but I being an techy idiot luv it, I love saying to Alexa movie night and watch the TV come on on the Netlfliks channel the curtains close the lights go out and the room goes purple, and my surround sound amm changes to TV mode. 

I have always connected my hall lights up to my alarm, I remember the first time I saw this on an old Castle 1250, it had a mains relay wired to an output when the alarm went off the lights came on. It struck me as a really good idea, if you had just broken in and the lights came on you would think that someone is in and has heard you and are on their way to catch you. Before I had hard wire lights up now its just a case of swapping the light switch and using a txer.

More recently (now my kids are teenage) I have come down in the morning and have found that the kids have left the kitchen or lounge lights on all night, and so I wired an wireless txer to the alarm so that whenever it is part set or full set it switch's all the lights off in the house. 

When I was at James house the other month he was using smartlights on his alarm to switch on the external lights when he opened the back door, I quite liked that idea.

[sixwheeledbeast]

I have always had some sort of integration with other things in the house using the alarm panel. Most is standard outputs using status or zone mimics.

Years ago you could see the alarm system becoming the central security hub but the way the market has gone consumer driven, I can see small embedded servers/routers in each home becoming the "central hub".

Issue I have with this though is security, it can't be a fit and forget product if your going to connect it to the internet. They are better as a stand alone system and interfaced as we do now.

 

I still feel the whole smart home thing is backwards, companies make the most money from selling your data and while people allow this to go on, smart home technology will never

 move on. They have no interest in making or developing a product that isn't harvesting your data in some way.

 

"Smart home" isn't smart if you are telling it to do something, that's just having a gopher. It should react to what's going on and your actions to assist without prompt, not using an app or remote.

In it's current form anything more "smart home" than standard outputs from an alarm seems pointless IMO.

[abbz]

I've just come across the sonoff range of smart home. Cheap as chips and have automated lights and things in outbuildings so far to see just how reliable it is. Wife isn't impressed ! 

[datadiffusion]

Found out the hard way just before holidays how this can go tits up badly, mind.

 

My Fibaro home controller creamed in, which means that certain rooms without local switches (doing it this way massively sped things up) 

were in the dark with literally no way to turn the lights on. Lots of rooms have basic, dumb PIRs like the toilets and laundry, but some like the

porch and other outside lights work off of a Fibaro PIR to allow for additional scene based switching and early-on / all-night on during

holidays etc... depending on light levels.

 

To make it worse Fibaro have pulled out of the UK (they still support from Poland but the office is closed).

 

Hapilly the controller is built upon a very ancient mini-ATX computer with only a custom case and custom (USB based) RF module,

I couldn't quite believe it but all tests pointed towards the mobo, unlikely I know as most computers need to be 99,9% working to even

get to the BIOS screen. It's linux based and although the VGA port is blanked off, connecting it to a monitor showed it hanging at

the USB stage, odd, since the USB appeared to otherwise work.

 

Long story short the only supply of identical mobos was the USA, hapilly they were peanuts (Intel Atom based) and not only is it fixed

I have upgraded the RAM too (and no it wasnt the RAM alone that was the issue, I checked that first!).

 

TLDR - If I ever move again, and do HA again, it will have to be for a system advanced enough for a 'mesh' type system where every

the controller is used only to make adjustments and the function and programming for every node is distibuted around the system,

e.g. the node is the controller relative to the others.

[norman]

Galaxy does a few lights (Hall, utility and external side lite linked to the gate) via links. I also have some presence pirs and quite a few Sonoff bits, including temp sensors for the kitchen plinth heaters. 

[james.wilson]

I said this years ago the only bit of kit that knows if your in, out or in bed is the alarm. Should be the hub for everything. 

[datadiffusion]

It should but although Z-wave is a great infrastructure it's mainly useless on it's own and only niche alarm manf's support it IIRC. At least my system knows (when it works...) if the alarm is set or not and some PIRs have z-wave piggybacks (stamp sized modules with super mini relays that sit between panel and PIR).

[scrimshanker]

Just to correct the above comment about fibaro, they haven't left the UK market at all. They where bought by Nice and now Nice UK administrator the company. They've changed the way they view the market and now are no longer straight to consumer, they only provide through registered installers like myself.

[al-yeti]

2 hours ago, scrimshanker said:

Just to correct the above comment about fibaro, they haven't left the UK market at all. They where bought by Nice and now Nice UK administrator the company. They've changed the way they view the market and now are no longer straight to consumer, they only provide through registered installers like myself.

How it take to Google all that ?

[scrimshanker]

1 hour ago, al-yeti said:

How it take to Google all that ?

Sorry, I don't understand your point