ADT, Vivint, OH2

Hardware Home Automation
1

Hi All,

So I bought a house recently and learned the previous owner had ADT for some time (Lynx Plus - not touch) is still in place and some other sensors as well, then he moved to Vivint, but when he moved out he took Vivint Panel, but he left a Vivint doorbel, two extra cameras and some smoke and fire detectors.

I’ve installed OH2 on a old laptop I have just for start playing around and could make it connect to the Nest Thermostat (also left back from previous owner), but I have no idea what I need in order to take over the devices I have at home.

Most of the devices seems to be 2GIG but there are a couple that are z-wave, so my question is, what do I need in order to connect these devices to my home WiFi ? WPS is not an option as my WiFi router don’t have this capability.

Any inputs for a beginner is appreciated.

2

None of this stuff works with WiFi at all.

For Z-wave you need to get a USB Z-wave controller. With this controller you will need to exclude the device and then include it on the new controller.

You may have to research the devices to find the manuals as they will tell you what action you need to take on the device during exclusion and inclusion.

The 2GIG stuff appears to be it’s own RF (I found this receiver) so you will need to research to see if there is a transceiver that you can plug into a computer and send/receive messages with these devices. Then you will need to find is someone has figured out what those messages need to be.

3

If the wired ADT panel is still there, you can use the Konnected.io device which allows you to connect wired alarms sensors to OH.

1 Like
4

Thank you KidSquid and rlkoshak.

All the sensors are wireless and the ADT Panel has an option for Landline or SIM card connections, so I think this will not be the best “HUB” I could use for all those devices.

Would be a better idea to buy a new HUB (Like the Samsung SmartThings Hub or any other model to connect all the devices to it and then to OH?

5

In the meantime I found this do you guys thing this can be an option ?

6

While this article was written for Home Assistant the same philosophy could be used for OpenHab.

The RTL-SDR is a USB radio receiver that will work as the alarm sensor receiver and then allow you to communicate via MQTT…some use the RTL-SDR to listen to their power and water meters.

Looks like a great way to use the sensors you have in the house…if you do forge ahead, take notes and pictures and share your knowledge with the community.

Squid

7

I’ve been using this HoneywellSecurityMQTT package to read the status of my 2gig sensors, and it was pretty painless. All you need to do is use something like mqttspy to listen to the/security/sensors345 topic to get the various device IDs for your sensors. You either need to wait for a periodic poll by the alarm system or simply open and close the contact you need to get the ID of. Here’s my basic config:

2gig.map (only needed if using mqtt v1 binding):

ALARM=OPEN
OK=CLOSED

alarm.items:

//mqtt v2 binding
// Set thing channel "Custom On/Open" value to ALARM, "Custom Off/Closed" value to OK
Contact FrontDoor_Contact  "Front Door Contact" {channel="mqtt:topic:2gigAlarmMQTT:frontDoorContact"}

//mqtt v1 binding
Contact FrontDoor_Contact  "Front Door Contact"  {mqtt="<[broker:/security/sensors345/123456/alarm:state:MAP(2gig.map)]"}
8

So, it took me sometime to get back in here to share my experience with you all.

Taking over Motion sensors (345MHz) was the easiest part, to help me, as I do not have any panel available nor usable I bought this in order to ready that frequency.

Using rtl_433 and MQTT it worked like a charm.

Next step, I decided to take over my Vivint cameras. it was not that difficult at all, when you learn of course. When you press the WPS buttotn on the camera it allows you to connect to it using WiFi and after that I could setup the camera to work on my WiFi. Still need to do that on two other cameras, including a Doorbell ring.

As I am not spending too much time on this as I wish, I am just giving you some highlights, I hope I can get back here soon to provide more details on my journey.

For now I have couple motions sensors communicating with OH2 and I have a camera that I need is working on my network but not on OH2 yet.

In the meantime, for those who read this post, if you have questions let me know and I can try to help, again, when this is ready I hope I can return here and provide some instructions that will help me as well in the future.