Vivint Sensors

Hardware Home Automation
16

Well the ability is there, through the “Customized script” option inside the camera:
Here is an example of the syntax see page 37-39:
http://download.vivotek.com/downloadfile/downloads/usersmanuals/ip21x2manual_en.pdf
That said I just use it for recording video\audio. It does have a two way audio if you pull up the web interface inside internet explorer and there is an app (android\apple) that probably works with it though I haven’t tried the app.
https://www.vivotek.com/iviewer/#views:view=jplist-grid-view

I use it with blueiris (a nice inexpensive dvr that is compatable with almost all cameras) which I launch via shortcut inside openhab, but there is a nice writeup on full integration here:

The camera also has the ability to save recorded video\pictures to a network share or ftp server, so you can set it up without any additional software. There is quite alot of cool motion detection/event capability baked right into the camera.

I have a feeling to get the doorbell button working your going to need to get your hands dirty with the custom script using the examples in the manual and the variables listed under “System” => “Parameters” Here is a screenshot of the area you’d be interested in.
I have a large glass window on my front door so there was little motivation to get that part working.

vivintDoorbell
vivintDoorbell886×734 31.3 KB

The first steps are to pair the doorbell to your wifi… here is a good how to to get into the doorbell if your comfortable with how WPS works:

Let me know if you have any other questions, or get stuck. Most of it is self explanatory once you get into the web interface of the camera. If you decide to get adventurous and play with the scripts post how far you get so others can maybe add to it. I havent gone that far but hopefully the links here helps get you to the right place.

17

@Luke_Bair many thanks for your contributions

To confirm, in order to take over the doorbell I simply need to use WDS to pair it with my router - then I can log in with root/adcvideo by hitting the DHCP IP address that’s given to it. Is the admin gui served on port 80 or a different port? From the screenshot it looks like 80, just want to confirm (I don’t have network access yet at my home)

Which other sensors have you been able to take over? I saw you mentioning the glassbreak sensor and the front door lock, were you able to take these over?
I’m pretty new to smart home tech but I’m no stranger to linux, scripting or networking… so I figure it should be pretty easy for me to get well adjusted here. But for the sake of covering all my bases - anything that is critical to know for this type of hacking? I keep hearing about a SDR is that needed for the doorbell at all or only for the other sensors?

Thanks and sorry for the noobie questions :slight_smile:

18

Yes, that is correct. Default port 80 is working on mine. I bought a zwave stick and played with paring various devices with mixed success. I am very new at this as well and I’ve got a busy home life, so I only really got the things working that I really need. Openhab can see the front door lock but I haven’t assigned it any rules or tried to do much with it. These days Im leaning towards maybe getting a smart hub that is Openhab compatible instead.

19

I have some indoor PING cameras from Vivint that I would like to reuse. I have the following questions:

  1. Is anyone got it working with the Openhab hub?
  2. Where do I found the menu for the indoor PING camera?
  3. How to put it on my local wifi network instead going through the vivint panel?
20

hey would love help on taking over my vivint equipment would you mind. i have a door bell, window sensors, camera and door sensors. Is it possible to take over?

21

Just to chime in that I have a 2GIG system, which I understand uses the same wireless door sensors and have been successfully using HoneywellSecurityMQTT (here) with a USB RTL-SDR radio just fine for a while to get open/closed status coupled with the MQTT binding. I found it best works on a powered USB hub because the USB radio dongle uses a lot of juice and gets quite warm but it works great plus it’s passive so my alarm system also still works as it should

22

I do have a doorbell ring from Vivint and I could get the ring/chime working even with no service.

What I did is to change a script that is in the camera (telnet connection) to trigger a secondary script on my OpenHab server, as I have it connected to a speaker I can hear it from anywhere in my house.

Of course I had to do some “tricks” on Linux in order to have it working but it is possible.

23

would you be able to share a guide and script on how you managed to do that in your setup?

24

Hi Richard, I will try my best as I have no documentation on all the steps:

Overall what I did was:

1 - Connect the doorbell to my Wifi Network
2 - Activate Web Interface
3 - Setup Camera (password, FTP, events, etc.)
4 - Activate Telnet
5 - Mount the file to a read-only location
6 - Add a SSH command line to trigger a sound on my server

1 - To connect the camera to my network I tried two things
a. Activate WPS on my Linux Server (that was a pain in the …). With WPS I could connect any WPS device to my network
b. I am pretty sure this is the one that really worked. I Pressed and hold the ring button for about 10 seconds then the camera reset and activate a WiFi network (Something like Vivint + Mac address) I then connected and browse for http://192.168.(0/1).1 and did setup it to my WiFi network.

2 - To activate Web Interface

An important command/URL to know is this: http://camera_ip:port/cgi-bin/admin/getparam.cgi it will list all parameters to you. Based on this I found this parameter network_http_webaccess and changed it to 1.

To set a parameter use this URL http://ip_camera:port/cgi-bin/admin/setparam.cgi?network_http_webaccess=1 – Do not use quotes to set a parameter

3 - To setup the camera just play around, there is no easy way to explain but once you are on the web interface you can figure this out.

4 - To activate telnet
This is the command/URL I use to activate telnet (SSH is not an option)

http://ip_camera:port/cgi-bin/admin/mod_inetd.cgi?telnet=on’

Don’t try the other parameter URL, it will not work. Once it is completed just telnet ip_camera use same credentials you have setup on your camera.

5 to mount the file system (it was needed in order to allow me to change the play_sound file as the partition is read-only)
mount --bind /mnt/flash/play_sound /usr/bin/play_sound

6
Then edit the play_sound file from your new location (/mnt/flash/play_sound). As there is no way to save credentials on the cameras for the ssh connection (next step), I downloaded PUTTY for Linux using wget to use sshpass so the command line I addes is
sshpass -p ‘password’ ssh user@ip_server/host "aplay /path/bell.wav"

Keep in mind you need to run this mount every time your doorbell ring is turned off, one option is to add this to the fstab file to mount automatically during the boot.

One other thing to keep in mind is, if you are using Linux (Ubuntu for instance) to play the bell.wav file you need to ensure the user that is playing is the same one that is logged in on your computer and that the audio device is working for that user.

I am pretty sure this is what I did to have it working.

1 Like
25

I did the same thing, but I “override” nice. “play_sound” invokes “nice”. My version of “nice” is stored on a read-write portion of the doorbell.

26

How did you manage to keep the changes ? As I mentioned I had to mount/bind the file to another location where I could “override” but when my doorbell reboot (i.e. power outage) I then need to mount/bind again. I was thinking of a script scheduled on my OH Server to check and mount/bind if needed.

Also Did you manager to redirect the chime to a different device ? In my case I am using a tabled for HabPanel and I would like the chime to “play” on this device instead of on OH Server. just didn’t find a solution for a non-jailbreak device.

27

I found that play_sound invokes “nice” without a path.
play_sound with e.g. doorbell.wav is invoked by chronos.
I copied the chronos config file (/etc/init.d/chronos) here: “/mnt/flash2/unifs/usr/bin”.
And I put my “nice” in the same location.
I modified the path in the chronos config file to include “/mnt/flash2/unifs/usr/bin” as its first entry.
I linked the modified chronos file from here “/etc/rcS.d” (S09chronos).

Now, when chronos invokes play_sound, play_sound invokes my “nice” (even after reboot AFAIK).

1 Like
28

Thank you.
This is way better than what I was doing (trying to mount) and works better and faster also.

29

I am newbie to scripting so my nice uses ‘touch’ to create a persistent indicator (in order to distinguish between nice invoked prior to playing “bell.wav” and nice invoked for other reasons). Are your scripting skills superior to mine and do you care to share your “nice”?

My next project is to use RTL-SDR and listen to the various sensors in my house. My first attempt to use HoneywellSecurityMQTT gave strange results as multiple doors were identified by the same identifier. I think HoneywellSecurityMQTT isn’t decoding my sensors’ output correctly.

30

Not at all, I am not good with scripts in Linux.

I using this RLT-SDT from Amazon. it works for what I need.

I am using mosquitto and this was a challenge to me in the beginning as all the documents I found did not work, but I figure this out last week using different pieces from different instructions.

I am using RTL_433 and mosquitto to get details from my devices, even though not all devices are showing on my list yet.

But I have it working showing up in HabPanel.

31

This is a great forum of knowledge here. Nice work men! I’m currently working on cloud video recording right now for the Vivint doorbell, and stumbled across this thread. I too, just bought a home that was decked out in Vivint gear from the previous owner (I still don’t understand how people pay $750-$1,000 to buy these devices and then leave them behind)…

After quickly realizing Vivint doesn’t play nice with anything, I went straight to Smartthings to try and get everything converted over. Thermostats connected perfectly. Door lock connected easily. Ifttt and the ST app lets me monitor and control both now from anywhere. Still unable to get the SkyControl panel connected to ST (keep getting froze up on the initializing Learn More on Vivint panel) but haven’t reset z-wave network on ST hub yet so unsure if this is due to a Vivint update restriction or what.

The house has 3 sensors installed. After trying like a mad man for days to integrate them into ST, I realized my ST started kit came with 2 sensors… bought one more on Amazon and swapped them all out with Vivint sensors… At this point the skycontrol panel is pretty useless other than displaying live video feed of doorbell movement, but I’ve realized unless I’m physically standing in the kitchen when someone rings the bell, the panel does me no good.

This was probably a useless post for most of you smart fellas, but I plan to post more as I continue tinkering.

32

This topic has been around a while but there is now a repository on GitHub that pretty much answers the original question.
It is titled:

DACSS = Duplicate A Commercial Security System

33

Hi,

I’ve been trying to connect the Vivint doorbell camera to my wifi network.
I am following the guide by Paulo (figorelli)
After resetting the doorbell/cam it appears as a wifi network VIVINT_DBC_({mac_address})
After connecting to it, and navigating to 192.168.1.1 the browser shows the WLAN settings page (see the screenshot below)
I can hit a button ‘Search your AP’ and select my Wi-fi network.
I am selecting WPA2-PSK which matches my router settings.
I selected ‘AES’ as the key format.
The last item is ‘Pre-shared key:’ which defaults to a series of zeros.
I tried just entering the wi-fi password, but when I hit save, the doorbell cam never connects.
The doorbell cam wi-fi is not longer available at this point, and I have to reset the doorbell cam by holding the button until the LED turns a red color. Then the doorbell cam’s wi-fi is back, and I can try again.

Don’t know much about this, but as understand it the ‘Pre-shared key’ PSK I guess, isn’t the same as the wi-fi password.

My router is a tp-link AX5400.
It has a search option, and when I search for ‘Pre-shared key’ it appears in the list of search results.
However when I click the item it just takes me to the wi-fi settings page. On that page, I can’t find any reference to a ‘pre-shared key’ even after playing around with the options.

Hopefully an expert here can help, I feel like I’m very close, but not quite.

Screenshot 2022-08-12 111434

34

Okay, I got it to connect.
Turns out that the ‘pre-shared key’ is the WiFi password.

The solution seems to have been to cut power to the doorbell for about 30 seconds.
After that I repeated the steps and it connected immediately.

35

@chrisleeuk I’ve got a Vivint VS-DBC300 doorbell camera and I’m trying to use it without any other vivint equipment. I managed to factory reset it and connect it to my router via WPS and I couldn’t figure out how to get a video feed from it. It seems to only be exposing port 80, but when I connect to it it just gives me a Not Found page.

After that I tried resetting it to factory again and connecting to the wifi network it creates (VIVINT_DBC300_XX:XX:XX) where the XX’s are the last 6 digits of the MAC address. Do you know the default password? Nothing I tried worked. And do you have any tips on what to do once I connect to it so I can get a video feed? Any help is greatly appreciated :slight_smile: