Hey @spammy yes I think you’ve found the “best” way by using the homeassistant component which basically makes a sensor on the device “in reverse” by importing a sensor in Home Assistant to the ESPHome device and making it operate as a local binary sensor on the device.
I haven’t played with this feature but I’m glad that you have and that it works as expected!
Now, this kinda begs the question … is the “standalone” feature really worth it if you’re now introducing reliance on HA sensors again. This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one. I can see pros and cons of using HA as the brains of the alarm versus the Konnected device as the alarm brains. I suppose if you have most of your critical sensors hardwired to Konnected, it still makes sense from a downtime/reliability perspective to use the standalone alarm.
Love to see the creativity and extensibility in the wild!
I suppose if you have most of your critical sensors hardwired to Konnected, it still makes sense from a downtime/reliability perspective to use the standalone alarm.
This is exactly it really. The minimum requirement for us was to replicate the reliability and robustness of an existing legacy alarm system. Although my HA instance is pretty reliable I would want the alarm to still operate in the low-but-possible case of HA going down while away. This is also why a functioning keypad was essential (which works wonderfully btw), and also why I couldn’t use Konnected before the standalone feature was available.
But once that minimum requirement was achieved I always planned to leverage the new uses that a smart platform can bring - for example it’s already directly checking in with healthchecks.io and providing state and zone updates via Telegram (that is, without relying on HA). That’s not to say I won’t also be coming up with some HA automations too (like arming semi-automatically when everyone leaves the home).
Expanding the legacy wired system was too much of a hassle to bother, but now I have an opportunity to do so pretty cheaply, albeit in a “hybrid” way. Yes, it ties the extra sensors to the reliability of HA, but that’s still better than what we had before. My biggest concern was what would happen if HA did go down during an armed state - imported sensors of this type seem to be “sticky” so there shouldn’t be any false alarms, just a false negative if an intruder breaches a window during such a case - but then the legacy sensors would maintain the previous level of security in that case anyway.
Is there any update regarding this statement you said, @nate : “But, I’m planning on rolling out features that would let you use a local keypad, local keyswitch, local fingerprint sensor, etc to interact with the arming and disarming of the device” ?
That is something I’m waiting for, as I would prefer to have a total standalone alarm system, not relying on HA, and disarmable with a traditional keypad. This way I would never depend on an app, a tablet or some hardware that can easily be a point of failure.
Great work on everything you are doing! I want to install a Konnected system in my new house, that currently has nothing (Alarm, Sensors, PIR etc). Before I go all in, I really need an offline keypad. @tboby has shown its possible, so if there isn’t a more officially supported method, I’ll try that, but before buying any hardware an update would be great!
As you said above, there are plenty of Wiegand compatible keypads out there and this would be a serious improvement!
