VMWare 6.7.0 u3 running on HP DL380 G7 - AD2USB attached and passed through to VM, works.
Ubuntu Focal
Zulu 11
OH 3.0.1
I’m new to OH. Trying to replace an old Vera3 with this, if I can get this to work. My issue is with Alarmdecoder. I have the USB version, and it works perfectly (AFAICT) in my setup - from a hardware perspective. I have the alarmdecoder binding installed, I created a keypad thing, and a keypad item from the “message” channel, and I can see the panel’s output in realtime - zone faults, etc.
I have 6 hard-wired zones (1-6), and a number of RF zones. My goal is to create each zone in OH and be able to see them fault and “un-fault” in realtime as items (or things, w/e is correct), so I can create rules surrounding those events.
If someone could please clue me in to how to accomplish this, I’d be very grateful. I’m not sure if my AD2USB needs a certain config to make this work, or if this whole thing is accomplished in OH. Any info would be much appreciated.
Hi! Welcome to the openHAB forum! In general you should be able to do everything you want using only configuration in OH, but there are sometimes exceptions. If you already have the bridge and a keypad thing configured and working, that is half the battle. I would suggest using auto-discovery to configure your zone and rfzone things as described in the docs. As you fault/unfault your various zones, the things for them should show up in openHAB’s inbox. Then you can just accept them and attach items to whatever channels you are interested in. In particular this will probably be the contact channel on zone things and the loop1-loop4 channels on rfzone things. You can also get information on the state of various zones by just looking at keypad or LRR messages, but that may be less straightforward.
Some alarm panels don’t directly expose their built-in wired zones, so if you run in to that problem you may have to do some additional configuration on the alarm panel and/or the alarm decoder unit. I’m not sure how to do that, but if you search both the openHAB and Alarm Decoder forums, you should be able to find info on it. Chances are that all of your zones should just work, though.
I have done as you suggested. To be safe, I created a fresh VM and installed Fossa, Zulu11, and OH, set up the AD binding with discovery, verified that the keypad was showing realtime messages, and then started tripping zones. I went through the house 3 times, systematically faulting each zone, then checking the Inbox. The system found 3 of my 14 zones - all detected as wireless, only one of which actually was. The regular hard-wired zones were given serial numbers just like an RF zone would, but they appear to just be randomly generated. I spent an hour fiddling with channels and items, trying to get the zones to ever show as “faulted” in OH - no luck. 2 stayed NULL, the other stayed CLOSED.
As an experiment, I installed a HomeAssistant VM - it took me 5 minutes to install the AlarmDecoder binding, and set up all the zones and fault a few of them - it worked perfectly. The zone icons on the dashboard changed almost instantly when I faulted a zone. That means my panel and my AD2USB are perfectly capable of doing this. The problem really seems like OH (or the binding). I was thinking that tomorrow I might do a fresh install of OH 2 and see if it works any better. All the information on this topic I have found applies to v2.
I’m more than happy to try anything else you might suggest - and thank you again for your time!!
That’s very strange. There is no way that I can think of for the binding to mistake a RF zone for a hardwired zone or vice versa. The messages that come from the AD unit about them are totally different (the former use RFX messages and the latter use EXP or REL messages). Are you seeing any messages about communication problems or errors in the logs?
I would recommend setting the logging level for the binding to DEBUG or TRACE so you can see what is going on. You’ll see the messages to and from the AD unit, and additional info about how the binding is processing them. The protocol is documented here, which will help you to understand what you’re seeing.
If you see messages coming in that the binding is misinterpreting or having problems parsing, let me know and I can fix it. You may also want to make sure that your AD unit is running a recent version of the firmware, although I doubt that is the problem.
