Texecom Connect opinions

[daern]

To echo the above, absolutely you can control and receive alerts away from home using HA!

Speaking personally, I use Pushover for my alerting - it's more flexible than just relying on the built-in Home Assistant app and gives a separate communication path independent of HA. The integration is relatively simple too. Just to give a bit of an idea:

Simplest of all - if the alarm is triggered on either the house or the garage, let me know with a nice loud noise:

- id: notify_alarm_triggered
  alias: Notify if alarm is triggered
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
    - alarm_control_panel.house_alarm
    - alarm_control_panel.garage_alarm
    to: triggered
  condition:
  action:
  - service: notify.pushover
    data_template:
      title: 'Alarm triggered - {{ trigger.to_state.attributes.friendly_name }} '
      message: 'The alarm has been triggered. {{ trigger.to_state.name }} has changed.

        This happened at: {{ now() }}

        '
      data:
        sound: siren
        url: https://<redacted>:8123

This one is used when the garage is alarmed:

- id: isolate_garage_door_if_alarmed
  alias: Isolate garage door if alarm turned on
  trigger:    #1
  - platform: state
    entity_id: alarm_control_panel.garage_alarm
    from:
    - disarmed
    - pending
    - arming
    to:
    - armed_home
    - armed_away
    - armed_night
  action:   
  - service: switch.turn_off      #2
    entity_id: switch.garage_door_isolator
  - service: camera.snapshot     #3
    data_template:
      entity_id: camera.garage_door
      filename: /config/downloads/garage_door_alarm_snapshot.jpg
  - service: notify.pushover     #4
    data_template:
      title: Garage Alarm Set
      message: "The garage alarm has been set.\n This happened at: {{ now() }}\n"
      data:
        sound: bugle
        url: https://<redacted>:8123
        attachment: /config/downloads/garage_door_alarm_snapshot.jpg

This might look complicated, but it's really quite simple and does the following:

1) if the garage alarm panel switches from an unset state to a set state (note that there are a few of each!) then...
2) Turn off the electric garage door (I have an isolator which this controls which removes power to prevent it being opened remotely when the garage is alarmed)...
3) Grab a snapshot from the CCTV camera pointing at the garage door to see who set the alarm and finally...
4) Send a notification to my phone to tell me it happened, and include the image from the camera

As you can see, although it looks a bit complicated, it's actually quite simple and, when combined with other devices (in this case the isolator for the garage), you can get some really useful automations. I'd actually completely forgotten about this one until I was looking for a simple example, but it's a great example of how you can increase security in a relatively simple way that ensures you'll never forget to turn off the remote garage door opener when you are away from home.

 

[secureiam]

It makes good sense an extra layer of protection.

whilst I am not familiar with HA or Pushover and until I get the unit later this month and start to have a play.

It looks relatively simple above.
I say relative. I can read it with no knowledge and it makes sense.

Correct me if I am wrong or not fully there.

1.HA is modular
2. You add integrations like Texecom or solar panel brand to get communications between HA and the device.
3. You need to set up all the ids of the associated equipment.

Does the HA integration with Texecom self populate any information? Just thinking areas. Zone names etc etc maybe be pulled in rather than have to be written in. How does that work what are limitations if any.

4. yaml file contains the instruction of what to do given a specific set of conditions

So first one says if the house or garage alarms are triggered send alarm with time stamp and sound alarm on app?, don’t see where it’s sending to.
Guessing you can have separate the different triggers so it goes to different places, just don’t see it defined.

The second one

I can see the second one

Says that the alarm panel garage area when changes to an armed condition switches off the isolater, takes a picture from a camera send a notification to say it’s set and when it was set and the sound associated with it is a bugle

So this is how many modules integrated into HA.
Texecom, pushover …….frigate?

I have a few ideas how I would like some things to work. Ie snapshots on change of device status rather than alarm triggered as it was set.
But need to start walking first.

 

[daern]

1.HA is modular
2. You add integrations like Texecom or solar panel brand to get communications between HA and the device.
3. You need to set up all the ids of the associated equipment.

Home Assistant *is* modular, but it also contains a great deal out of the box (including most integrations you'd use day to day). Integrations generally talk to things outside of HA - this might be to control devices, or it might be to do something else (e.g. send a notification). Most integrations require some sort of configuration to authentication with whatever service you're using - for a local device this might be nothing more than an IP address, a cloud service typically has a username and password (or, better still, an API key). Texecom2MQTT has an IP address and port, and a UDL password (see below).

Integrations usually come in one of three sorts:

1. Built-in integrations - These are baked into Home Assistant out of the box and are updated with the main product (new releases every month). These can be devices (e.g. the Tuya cloud platform) or other services (e.g. notification services like Pushover). Generally, these days, they are configured through the user interface literally by clicking the "Add integration" button from the pages linked above, which will link back to your own HA deployment and step you through the configuration process. In most cases, no messing with YAML needed to set them up and it's usually no more than sticking in some credentials so HA can access whatever service you need. e.g. in the case of Pushover, you generate an API key for your account on the Pushover website and this is all HA needs in order to send notifications through it.

2. Custom integrations - There's a whole host of more niche integrations which are available to support a wide and weird selection of devices. Typically, these are written in Python and downloaded into the "custom_components" folder in your HA deployment. There is a third-party app called "HACS" which helps index and manage these for you, turning this into a "click and play" process too. In my environment, I have integrations with my car, vacuum cleaner and Frigate installed as custom components, as well as a few more niche utilities which support parts of my system.

3. Add-ons - These are the heavy-weight custom integrations. Technically, these are powerful, standalone applications running in containers alongside HA, but because of this there are few limits as to what they can do and they can be exceptionally powerful as a result. In a Home Assistant OS deployment (this is certainly what you'd want to do first with a Raspberry Pi!) these are generally easy to deploy and configure, but often have their own specific configuration to make them work correctly and quite often have dependencies on other add-ons to work. A few examples of add-ons are ESPHome (massively powerful add-on for managing custom, ESP32/8266-powered devices), Frigate (AI-powered camera NVR with object recognition), Mosquitto (MQTT broker - an essential for many other add-ons in Home Assistant) and texecom2mqtt (the current integration with Texecom which, as the name suggests, requires an MQTT broker to work).

For the texecom2mqtt add-on, it follows the standard HA add-on installation. Once you're up and running with HA and have configured Mosquitto (plenty of tutorials out there for this, but it's just another add-on installed through the UI!), you can install texecom2mqtt following the detailed instructions on the link above. You need a bit of config to make it work which, for me, looks like this:

texecom:
  host: <redacted>
  udl_password: <redacted>
  port: 10001
mqtt:
  host: <redacted>
  port: 1883
  username: <redacted>
  password: <redacted>
  client_id: texecom2mqtt
homeassistant:
  discovery: true
areas:
  - id: house
    name: House Alarm
    full_arm: armed_away
    part_arm_1: armed_night
    part_arm_2: armed_home
    code_arm_required: false
    code_disarm_required: true
    code: "<redacted>"
  - id: garage
    name: Garage Alarm
    full_arm: armed_away
    part_arm_1: armed_night
    part_arm_2: armed_home
    code_arm_required: false
    code_disarm_required: true
    code: "<redacted>"
zones: []
log: info

Nothing too complicated here. As you can see, it has the config of the alarm (IP address, port and UDL password), the MQTT broker (IP address, port, credentials) and some configuration on areas. These map to the areas configured on the panel - IIRC the ID has to match the name configured on the alarm, or can use a numeric ID instead. You can then map the texecom part arm configurations to the Home Assistant built-in states (armed_night, armed_home etc.) and define a code that will be used by HA. Note: this is not the code used on the alarm itself and is simply the code exposed through the HA UI.

Once you've got it set up, when you first start up the add-on, it will connect to the alarm and auto-discover all of the zones and areas and will map them to HA. You should create a new device for the alarm, then a whole load of sensors (for all of the individual zones) and alarm control panels in HA which should match what you have set up in the alarm itself. As part of this it creates some pseudo alarm panel controls which you can use to set and unset directly from HA, including the part-sets you defined in the config above.

Definitely, though, the first step is to get the basics up and running. Follow a youtube tutorial for the initial setup and consider subscribing for a free trial of Nabu Casa (HA's companion cloud service) which makes it very easy to provide remote access to your installation with a couple of clicks without messing with SSL certificates and port forwarding / reverse proxies. You can certainly manage without this, but this is a good way to get up and running quickly and you can always change it later.

 

[secureiam]

This maybe should be a separate thread.

What do you think to making device Poe, just less cables to have but see it’s an add on.

 

[simjam]

Any recommendations for tutorials to learn the basics to get up and running for someone with no previous experience, (my son has some experience with Linux/ YAML) thanks

 

[daern]

I would start with something like this:
https://www.juanmtech.com/getting-started-with-home-assistant-2021/ (both video and written tutorials available) or the official documentation: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/

These tutorials tell you what you need to get started and how to get to the point of having a basic, working HA install. Nothing here requires any serious Linux or YAML knowledge beyond editing the odd file here and there. In fact, to a large extent, you don't need to get involved with Linux if you are running HA on an RPi - it's all hidden away.

What do you think to making device Poe, just less cables to have but see it’s an add on.

Do you mean for the RPi itself? No, I wouldn't personally. Partly because the RPi4 needs a really good quality power supply and doing something like this adds another unknown into the mix which might cause stability issues down the road. When getting started, keep things simple and add it later if you feel you need to.

 

[secureiam]

The POE supply is good and have to have network connection, just need to add Poe capability to the RPi unit.

 

[secureiam]

The Pi4 4Gb essential units just came into stock so got it ordered.

 

[secureiam]

Okay got the pi4 4gb sat on the office desk, booted it up and can have access to the device.

I can see my SSD 1TB, looks like last time I used this was changing a HDD to the SSD on a windows device , nothing on there I need anymore so we can wipe it all clean and start from scratch

 

[secureiam]

struggling to find things in HA, but have at least got HA onto the pi and added the addon for Texecom at least i think I have.

Think I am missing some components to simplify it all and crack on.

 

[pcaouolte]

On HA go to Settings - Add-ons

Do you see Mosquito broker and texecom2mqtt? If so you have installed the Texecom add-on.

 

[secureiam]

I should have the texecom but installed as I added repository and installed that eventually but not sure where I can add the bits I need to are located ie ip address udl in yaml file

 

[secureiam]

okay done. looking a little better, helps if you make sure it is green and it has actually started, can see the configuration

 

[pcaouolte]

In Settings - Add-ons - texecom2mqtt look at the log tab at the top of the screen. If it is fetching data from the panel you should see something like:

It also helps to install MQTT Explorer on your PC (not on the pi). Then you can use it to see what has been sent to the Mosquito broker and watch the zone status change from 1 to 0 as the zone is activated:

 

[secureiam]

slap my wrist looks like a white space issue possibly got a connection just need to configure the mqtt