Well I guess it is time to open the Kimono. Over the last 9 months or so I have managed to take over the security panel.
When I bought this house a year ago in July (2018) it had a Vivint system installed. I looked into taking over the contract and they told me I had to upgrade to a new panel for $640. At the time the cable guy was here and said he had a system installed recently and it had the same panel that I had. I dropped the subject and moved on to the thousand other things one has to do when they move. Later I called Vivint again and this time I was told that for a $100 charge I could assume the contract. I said, “Wait a minute, you want me to pay $100 for the right to pay you $50/month? I don’t think so ! You should be giving me free months”.
So, come last January, after reviewing the outstanding work by dengland (https://denglend.github.io/decode345/) on his Honeywell sensor, I decided to take on the Vivint system.
It consisted of:
4 door sensors,
5 window sensors,
2 smoke/heat sensors,
2 co sensors but these are expired so I am looking for substitutes.
1 glass break sensor,
1 Thermostat
1 Door lock.
Currently I have a security HABpanel setup that shows me the state of all the sensors and if I enable email and/or text, if any sensor indicates “Open” or “Fire/Heat” or “Glass Break”, I get an email and my phone gets a text message.
I don’t know where to go from here. This was my first project using:
Raspberry Pi,
Linux,
SDR,
GRC,
z-wave,
C programming,
mqtt,
And do doubt a few more firsts that I can’t remember.
Needless to say the route that I took to get here is full of so many fits and starts and two steps forward, 1.9 steps back. To keep track I “scrawled” my notes into a Word document. It is about 7 pages long and I don’t remember what many of the items are for. And then there are all these “auxiliary” tools I created. What do I do with them? For example I built an Excel spreadsheet to help recognize the messages I was detecting and try to match them to previous messages and devices.
I don’t know what to do with this information. Github I guess. But github is another thing I know nothing about.
What do I do?
Pete Calinski