Hey so i started the transition back in November and I will say it has been mostly painless I haven't had to port ADT Tools ,or a variant of it, as most of the functionality ADT Tools enabled is either already part of HSM or part of other included Smartapps from Hubitat. So you can do it mostly from within the provided apps that come with the hub.
My biggest concern when choosing to migrate the Alarm functionality from the Smartthings ADT Panel was what gear to use. You are right in that the Dual Branded sensors don't come over. After some research and testing two sensors what i settled on were Ring Contact Sensors Gen 2. There are a few reasons.
- They are on a known current alarm system component.
- The do produce Tamper alerts
- They talk back to the Hub on a regular basis which allows for status monitoring of the device itself, not just what they are monitoring.
- The Gen 2 Ring Gear uses Zwave 7 or the 700 chipse with Smartstart and S2 security.
After I confirmed what contact sensors to use I switched my focus to the motion sensor. that is probably the single most used device in my house as i primarily use them to automate some lights. I figured since i liked the Door/Windows sensors so much i would try Rings Gen 2 motion detectors as well. They did not disappoint. With a motion detection setting of 1 they are extremely responsive and work great the have all the same good features above and they use AAA batteries which will make that easy to take care of later.
You would need a external siren and I ended up falling on the Aeotec siren 6 which has several sounds in it that include a Ding Dong sound similar to what the ADT Panel had. I liked it because it is connected to mains power but also has a battery back, and a light built in. It isn't perfect though as you can't load your own sounds. I think zooz has a decent option as well, but it doesn't have Mains power.
The keypad I decided on again was the Ring Gen 2 Keypad. Yes this does seem to have a theme to it doesn't it. Again Gen 7 zwave and all of the above features for device monitoring.
So once that was all acquired I start to finalize the setup. I used HSM for as much as I could. I set up it's options to monitor all of the contact sensors and have the alert options I wanted as far as audible alerts, flash lights, activate sirens, and send notifications for intrusion. Setup my entry/exit delays for the alarm modes configured. Setup notifications for Arming failures for opened sensors. Setup a auto arm option for when I put my house to sleep. Added a custom monitor in HSM to keep an eye on the batteries. All of that in HSM.
HSM is good for allot of the features, but there were still some things that it didn't take care of though and that is when i had to lean on other built in apps to fill in the gaps. Hubitat has a app called "Notifications". In that app I created 2 additional configurations
- A alert notification that tells me when any of the alarm components have a triggered tamper event.
- A door open/close which triggers a audible alert to select google home devices of which door/window opened. (similar to the voice option on the ADT Panel)
The last thing i did was use another built in app called RuleMachine to create some more advance actions based on additional triggers from the Alarm. The purpose of these rules are as follows
- A geofence rule that will arm the house when i leave based on my phone
- Clear an alert if a arming failure happens. This prevents me from having to manually clear it once i resolve the problem. When the Arming fails, HSM will tell me what device is in a bad state via Google Home mini.
- Notification of HSM Armed State change
- Flip a virtual switch that is still integrated with Smartthings so StHM knows what state the alarm is in.
- Generate Ding Dong sound when contact is open.
Lastly I did add a smartapp called "Device Activity Check" which just keeps us informed if a device stops talking for a period of time. The idea is to be like a supervision check to make sure the device didn't just die on you.
This was all to get as close to possible to what we had with the Smartthings ADT alarm panel. That doesn't mean it is all needed to have a working HSM Alarm. I am just trying to make it as complete a solution as possible.
I will say from my perspective most of this was very easy to setup. The ring gear since it uses the Gen7 gear with Smartstart was simply scan the QR Code provide in the Mobile app and then pull the battery tab and wait for the devices to connect. Just don't mess with the security settings in the Smartstart screen. The only Ring item that gave me any problems was the Keypad. I had to do a hard reset after the initial setup because for some reason it wasn't sending the codes to the hub. Honestly though i think that was a range issue with where i was testing it. The Aeotec siren added with no problem. just be aware once you add it the tamper alert can be fairly sensitive and since it sounds the siren you may want to place it where you want it to be so you don't keep triggering the tamper alert before you add it. If not you may want to go into the device and the volumes down a bit until you get it set where you want it.
Very easy to setup doesn't mean though that it wasn't tedious. It does take time and you want to be sure everything is set how you like it. The problem with machines is that they do exactly what you tell them to do so take time to make sure you tell it exactly what you want it to monitor.
