So the app adds three toggle (on/off) switches: Arm Away, Arm Stay, Disarm. One of the three will be "on" at all times. If you turn "on" Arm Stay, Disarm and Arm Away will be turned "off". The same applies for the other two.
Disarm acts slightly differently, in that you really don't turn "off" disarm (logically, it itself is an off switch). There's a preference to set the default "off" behavior for disarm. The normal behavior is to simply switch disarm back to "on" if it's turned off (thus, doing nothing). But you can change this behavior to either arm stay or arm away when disarm is turned "off". (Sorry, this does sound a bit confusing)
For my own dashboard, I have just the Arm Stay switch added. I can easily see the state of the panel ("on" == system armed, "off" == disarmed). Toggling the switch effectively controls my most used panel mode (which is arm stay).
I should also note that if you're using Alexa or Google Home, you should be careful in exposing the ADC switches to them, as someone could, in theory, yell "ALEXA TURN ON DISARM" to disarm your alarm system without being in the house. My echoes do not have access to the ADC switches for these reasons. In fact, I'll add a note to the readme to cover this point.
Thanks. That helps a lot. I haven’t left the house to try “arm away” but “arm stay” works. I’m a little confused about “disarm” though. I have three switches on my dashboard that are the three ADC states. I thought that if I clicked any one of them that mode would be selected and the other two would be turned off.
So I'm a (soon to be former) SmartThings user. There's a community app similar to mine that integrates with alarm.com that I had used on ST. When I started writing my HE app, I emulated some of the functionality of the ST app, which also has a dedicated disarm switch. I believe in the ST app, you could only turn switches on, not off... Which warranted the disarm switch.
After I got mine together, I added the ability to turn all the switches off. This makes the disarm switch a little unnecessary, but it could still be useful for any routines where disarming the panel can be accomplished through a single switch.
Regardless, you don't really need to use the disarm switch if you don't want. As I mentioned, on my primary home dashboard, I only have the arm stay switch exposed and it works great.
Thanks. I’m beginning to understand now. I just need to use it a bit to get a feel for what you described. Thanks for creating the app and for being available to explain things.
So I updated the app to fix a couple things, and also included password encryption. I'm not super thrilled with how I had to go about encrypting the password (I can't decrypt it and put it back in the preferences field for future app updates), but it works in a round about way. And most importantly, the password is now encrypted in the HE settings table. But because of the oddball way I had to support it, I added a flag to indicate whether the user wants encryption enabled.
I also created a new thread, since I realized I was kind of hijacking this one. So future updates will go there:
Thank you so much for doing this! This was the one thing that was missing from my HE experience, and I was working a terrible Kludge where I had Google Home setting the alarm as "Arm Stay" when we left.
Tested last night with my "good night" routine, and it performed perfectly. Maybe one of these days, I'll get everyone out of the house (pandemic and all) and be able to test my "Everyone Left" routine!
How do you mean, "add automation devices"? As in, have the other devices (such as door/window sensors) linked to the alarm.com panel available within Hubitat?
As far as I know, that's not currently possible. The problem is the interface to alarm.com. There is no true API that supports web hooks or events. So for the ADC HE app, it's able to arm/disarm the panel by sending web service requests in, but in order to fetch details like panel state (or those of the panel's devices), it has to poll the panel periodically.
In theory, you could do this every minute and get somewhat close to a desire state. But polling that often is not recommending. So by offering integration with the devices, it would effectively require frequent polling, which has very negative performance impact on the HE device itself.
For my setup, I have almost all my home automation controlled via HE. With the ADC app, I can arm/disarm my panel via the HE/automation routines. The alarm.com panel itself has only basic devices linked. Like a few door sensors and a motion senor. Those devices are not linked to my HE.
tl;dr version: It's not currently possible, and I doubt it ever will be given how alarm.com does not offer access to a modern web service platform. I recommend doing as much as you can with your HE.
Thank you for the App - it is extremely valuable and useful for me as I migrated from ST to HE - Kudos for making the transition so much smoother!
On Homebridge, I am using a plugin that uses the node-alarm-dot-com interface / API located here. The plugin taps into all of my alarm sensors & home automation (in my case Lutron and MyQ) devices that are integrated with alarm.com via the API inclusive of the ability to control them from homebridge (and subsequently homekit on iOS). I was wondering if the same interface can not be ported to work with HE to enable the use of it in smart integrations as well as dashboards? My days of coding are long over but thought I would pass this info along and see if you or anyone else on this thread would like to give it a go?
Hi, I am an HE newb/Wink survivor. I have an off contract Vivint 2gig Go control alarm system that I have been wanting to move to alarm.com. I just want to confirm that if I do this and use this integration that jmpierce built. I will be able to have HE tell the alarm to arm away, arm stay or disarm. But I wouldn't be able to have HE talk to the thermostat or the locks (the only home automation I have with the alarm panel) even though they are z-wave? (I get that the sensors wouldn't report because they are 345mhz) That would require the alarm panel acting as a secondary controller, which it isn't supported by HE?
Also, using this alarm.com integration, would mean that it would be web based not local?
I am just trying to make sure I know what I am getting into as I wait for my Lutron caseta bridge so I can control my lights again after ditching Wink.
