Okay, so I wanted to beef up the security around my place, and I figured, why not use Home Assistant for that? I’d been using it for a while to turn lights on and off and play around with some other smart home stuff, but I hadn’t really explored the security side of things. So, I decided to set up an arm system using Home Assistant.
First, I had to get some gear. I already had a bunch of Zigbee door/window sensors and a couple of motion detectors from when I was setting up automated lighting. I also grabbed a Zigbee smart siren just in case things got real. All my stuff is hooked up to Home Assistant through a Zigbee dongle plugged into my server, so that was the easy part.
Next, I started digging into Home Assistant’s alarm control panel. Turns out, they have a pretty neat “Manual” alarm control panel integration. This lets you set up a basic arm system with different states like “armed home,” “armed away,” “armed night,” and so on. I added it through the integrations page, and boom, I had a basic alarm panel on my dashboard.
But here’s where it got a bit tricky. I wanted the system to automatically arm when I left the house and disarm when I came back. I also wanted it to trigger the siren if a sensor was tripped while armed. So, I started messing around with automations. The first automation I created was to arm the system in “armed away” mode when both my wife and I were away from home. I used the “zone” feature in Home Assistant to create a “home” zone and tied it to our phones’ GPS location. Pretty simple, right?
Then, I created another automation to disarm the system when either of us got home. This was basically the reverse of the first one. Now, for the fun part. I created a third automation that would trigger the siren if any of my door/window sensors or motion detectors were activated while the system was armed. I set the trigger to be the state change of the sensors, and the action to be turning on the siren and sending a notification to my phone.
- Device setup: Hooked up Zigbee door/window sensors, motion detectors, and a siren to Home Assistant.
- Alarm panel integration: Added the “Manual” alarm control panel integration in Home Assistant.
- Automations: Created automations to arm/disarm the system based on our location and trigger the siren if sensors were tripped.
I tested it out, and man, that siren is loud! I had to quickly disarm it to avoid a headache. But it worked! I did a few more tests, walking around the house, opening doors, and everything worked as expected. I also added a keypad integration so that I could manually arm/disarm the system with a code, just like a traditional alarm system.
It took some trial and error, but I finally had a pretty solid arm security system set up with Home Assistant. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. I might add some cameras later on, but for now, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s cool to be able to use the same system I use for other smart home stuff to also keep an eye on my place. Plus, it was a fun little project to work on!