Texecom Connect opinions

[simjam]

Morning all, I'm in the process of updating an old alarm system. I'm keeping the pirs/ contacts and updating the control panel etc. I am looking at the Texecom Elite 24 with an internal zone expander + smart communicator. My question is about the Connect app mainly, the reviews seem to be generally not great from app feedback. I've tried to search the forum and can see loads of posts going back several years but wanted to check what the current consensus is.
Is the app glitchy, does it work ok, is it worth having or are there better options. I've read about Home Assistant and this is something I'm interested in so would that be a better option if I'm happy to fiddle around. Would that option be secure etc.
Thanks for any advice.

 

[secureiam]

There are problems with many things from time to time.
As for apps I can’t think of any app that hasn’t had an issue from time to time.
The main issue is understanding of how things work.

so If using home assistant which I haven’t yet had a play with, I would recommend a separate com ip module or turning off the the coms for the app keeping the comip part of the smart com completely free.

 

[daern]

To echo @secureiam , I use Home Assistant extensively with my Elite panel (integration add-on thread here: https://community.home-assistant.io...l-and-mqtt-integration-with-ha-support/219354) and it's absolutely bomb proof. I've even recently decommissioned my old bespoke alerting (driven from the panel IO - a holdover from my old alarm system) as the Texecom integration is superior and equally reliable. The Home Assistant interface with the panel is all local - literally your local HA deployment talking directly to your own alarm panel - so it's actually more secure than any of the cloud offerings available for other alarm systems as it never leaves your own network and is not exposed to the internet in any way.

Yes, 100% you need a dedicated ComIP module. Loads of people's issues in the HA thread can be attributed to trying to run Texecom Cloud and HA using the same interface and it simply will not work. I played for a while using a single Smartcom with the online stuff disabled, but now have a separate ComIP dedicated for HA and the SmartCom is used for occasional Wintex configuration or checking logs. The cloud connectivity is all disabled.

One thing that isn't obvious from the docs, but the HA integration exposes all of the zones individually, so you can see individual door / room statuses in realtime (typically fraction-second latency) which allows you to do some really cool stuff with integrations. e.g. my driveway security light (controlled by HA) is controlled by object recognition from my cameras so it knows to turn on with a person, but not a car or a cat (for example). The downside is that it takes 1-2 seconds from walking out of the back door before you enter the field of view of the camera and Frigate can decide that I am a person and not a dustbin, during which time the light remains off. So now, I simply trigger using the back door sensor from the Texecom add-on. The moment I open the back door (assuming that several other requirements are satisfied - one being "is it dark?"), the security light turns on. And if the door is closed without it detecting a person in the first 10 seconds, it shuts off again immediately (otherwise it will stay on longer).

You can do anything you want of course, but exposing the alarm into your home automation is a really powerful starting point and highly recommended!

 

[pcaouolte]

For my own home alarm I use HA to generate the notifications rather than the Texecom app. Log events from the alarm are sent to HA and HA follows a set of rules to generate notifications to my phone. This has allowed me to completely customise which events are sent to each device and assign a priority level to each event so that an alarm activation is reported on the phone even when it is in do-not disturb mode but events of lower importance do not wake me at night. Maintenance events are sent to my phone but not my wife's phone. Some events I have decided to ignore. All completely customisable.

This was a lot of work and very specific to my own requirements. I would not do this for a customer, but it does demonstrate what is possible, it required weeks of work in my spare time to set this up.

The alarm can be armed and disarmed from the HA app. I don't use the Texecom app with this panel at all.

The panel has a single SmartCom. No notifications are sent to Texecom, that side of the SmartCom is purely connected to HA. The other side of the SmartCom still allows me to connect to the panel from the Texecom cloud or using Wintex.

Because HA is generating the notifications I didn't need a separate ComIP.

HA knows when a zone becomes active and can use this to switch on lights. HA also knows when the alarm is full set so can switch lights on/off at sensible times when we are away to give the impression that someone is at home.

 

[secureiam]

That’s interesting I am hoping to have a play with HA later this month to integrate solar panels for better stats, have yet to buy the pi unit. May want to pick your brains on this. What sort of spec do think is reasonable for the pi unit.

 

[daern]

I would certainly say an RPi 4 with 4GB - you can definitely run with less, but my experience with HA is that you'll soon be adding more and more components to it and will probably regret not getting more RAM (it's only £10 difference). One challenge is that RPi4s are quite tricky to get hold of right now due to stock issues, but plenty of people run HA on low-powered PCs ("NUCs" for example) - the downside is that the initial setup is a little more complicated down this route, but there's a stack of tutorials out there to help.

I too do not use the Texecom app (never have, to be fair) and do all of my notifications and alarms through HA. I could probably manage with a single interface on the alarm, but it's cleaner for me to leave one dedicated to management, and a separate ComIP just for HA. Saves having to stop the HA add-on every time I want to check the logs

Once you get into it, you'll be amazed with what you can do. Mine alerts me if we all leave the house without setting the alarm first (and, obviously, the alarm set/unset can be done through HA too so auto-setting would be trivial in this case, although it's something I've never wanted myself). Even the alerts from the CCTV changes behaviour depending on the set/unset state of the alarm, which is great for reducing the endless stream of pointless alerts for things you don't care about.

 

[pcaouolte]

Consider a metal case for the Pi to aid cooling, they do run pretty hot in a standard plastic case when running 24/7. Something like the Argon Neo works well.

Think about running the PI from an SSD, something like https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Extreme-Solid-State-Flash/dp/B01MU8TZRV?th=1 Home Assistant writes to storage a lot which can wear out a micro SD card fairly quickly.

 

[secureiam]

Have an ssid I could potentially use, what pi unit would you recommend as half decent for the job, seen a few in cases at around £90 touch not top end but seem okay

 

[pcaouolte]

I'm running it on a RPi 4 with 1Gb. If I was starting again I would go for one that is at least 2Gb as HA does seem to use quite a bit of memory.

 

[daern]

Consider a metal case for the Pi to aid cooling, they do run pretty hot in a standard plastic case when running 24/7. Something like the Argon Neo works well.

Think about running the PI from an SSD, something like https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Extreme-Solid-State-Flash/dp/B01MU8TZRV?th=1 Home Assistant writes to storage a lot which can wear out a micro SD card fairly quickly.

Good call on both of these. I used to use a fan (controlled by HA ) but swapped to this case which reduced temperature by 30C and resolved some stability issues I was seeing. You can get high-endurance SD cards now (commonly used in dashcams), but I've also swapped to an SSD (one I had lying around with a USB/SATA adapter) and the performance is significantly improved as a result.

I'm running it on a RPi 4 with 1Gb. If I was starting again I would go for one that is at least 2Gb as HA does seem to use quite a bit of memory.

I would concur with 2GB minimum.

Mine is a 4GB, and currently I'm using 56% of this. I have a few add-ons running (Texecom, ESPHome, Zigbee2MQTT, mosquitto, MariaDB, NUTS etc.) as well as Frigate (which is a topic in its own right!) so would struggle with less than this RAM, but a new user won't be running all of this on day #1 - I know I wasn't! The Pi4 is the perfect way to get going with HA and, if you outgrow it eventually, you'll probably know enough about the product by that point to tackle getting it running it on a standalone PC!

 

[secureiam]

Okay one I was looking at was 4GB PI4, so should be fine for a while with that.
best place to buy lots of places selling but not heard of many of them.

 

[daern]

Stock is tricky, but try here:

Raspberry Pi 4 Essentials Kit - Pimoroni

Our Raspberry Pi Essentials kit contains a top of the range Raspberry Pi 4 and all the essentials you need to make it work. Perfect for setting up a media server, for retro gaming emulation or even to use as a desktop machine.

shop.pimoroni.com

They have a bundle that's in stock, not too insanely priced and includes a (good quality) power supply and SD card (even with an SSD you need this to boot from). I've used this company before.

 

[secureiam]

Good that’s one I was looking at…..

 

[simjam]

Thanks for everyone's input, if the alarm is ideally controlled exclusively by HA which improves security as everything is internal, do people not bother with alerts away from home/ control away from home, that was one of the features I was told about when I started to research options and thought it was a good idea. I'm also looking at CCTV. Regards the comIP, will/ can this be the Texecom communicator (eg CEL-0001) or is there something better that should be used. (I'm right at the bottom of a steep learning curve so any advice/ recommendations are appreciated).

 

[pcaouolte]

Alerts away from home/ control away from home can be achieved through Home Assistant using the Home Assistant app. You will find that Home Assistant has a very steep learning curve and can be very frustrating when you first start using it. To get alerts through Home Assistant requires you to write YAML code to generate the alerts, how easy this is depends on your past experience with computers. It certainly isn't plug and play. I have over 300 lines of YAML code in Home Assistant just to generate alerts to the phone app.

CEL-0001 is perfect for connecting the Texecom alarm to Home Assistant if you don't want to use the Texecom app.