Buidling a personal home alarm, tips or ideas?

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I’m playing with some hardware to build a personal home alarm. To avoid some tunnel vision with my ideas, perhaps some can exchange thoughts or real life experience?

What I currently have in mind:

• PIR and contact sensors that communicate with pimatic
• Keypad that communicates with ESP and pimatic
• GSM module connected to raspberry pi to send alerts over SMS (so it doesn’t depend on a working internet connection)
• UPS module for raspberry pi
• Some siren to make some noise when the alarm is triggered
• Sen a SMS on every first monday of the month to test/confirm SMS functionality
• Door contact sensor on meter cabinet. When the contact sensor is triggered in alarm state it should immediately trip an alarm
• Send alerts (SMS or mail) when certain sensors don’t report over longer period
• Daily or weekly logs through email

The entire setup should be on a dedicated Pi without any other function than the purpose of the home alarm. It should continue to function on powerloss to avoid the simple solution "whoa a alarm … let be disconnect power to enter the house witrhout bein caught"
It doens’t has to be fort knox, neither does it has to be a nerdy setup with naked wires and pieces of ductape.

Is there anyone who has built some sort of home alarm and is willing to share some ideas or simple tricks?

https://pimatic.org/plugins/pimatic-alarm/
Should do the trick

Thanks, but as far as I understand is the plugin something that could easily be accomplished with a bunch of rules?

I don’t know about you, but anything that can keep the rule count low is welcome by me. For instance; not being able to do an “else” in rules makes for a whole bunch more.

When I have finished linking all my door contacts and smoke alarms to Pimatic, I will certainly take a look at the alarm plugin.

The triggering part is not what I’m worried about, I was more looking for tips/ideas like “trap an alarm immediately when the closet housing the pi is opened” or “think about being ablte communicate when there is no power/internet”

Well, no power/no internet means you’ll have to go to a different service to detect your Pi is not reachable.
I could recommend https://uptimerobot.com for this task. You could host an empty page on your PI or (if Pimatic is reachable from the webs) link it directly to your Pimatic interface.
Added bonus to IFTTT to setup a notification via your preferred service to send a notification to you when a down message (email) was received from https://uptimerobot.com .

I too was thinking about a Pimatic alarm system and i really liked the idea to use a dashbutton next to my bed and/or door to arm/disarm the alarm (when you go to sleep/exit the house).
Hope this is helpfull!

@koffienl said in Buidling a personal home alarm, tips or ideas?:

I was more looking for tips/ideas like “trap an alarm immediately when the closet housing the pi is opened”

Presumably, you need to build this your own, using a contact switch (e.g. an inductive sensor) located below the top part of the enclosure.

Needless to say, the Pi needs an backup power device with battery included and a comms device (e.g. UMTS card) to communicate if the Wifi or cable-based connect has been cut. Moreover, make sure the enclosure shields the SD-Card. Thus you probably need to roll your own enclosure which you possibly need anyway to house additional hardware.