Hi,
New hubitat user and first forum post. Apologies if this isn't best section for the question; I can gladly move if needed.
I've seen some posts that talk about getting DSC motion sensors working with hubitat but needing an integration with what seems to be yet another hub of it's own, EnvisaLink. Is this accurate? I was thinking I'd reuse some hardware from an old security system install, but if I need to buy another hub (what i'm trying to get away from with hubitat...) seems I should just fork over money for a zigbee or zwave motion sensor that would work out of the box. Thoughts?
Are these DSC sensors running some proprietary wireless protocol? I couldn't find any details on the innards of that exactly. Specifically I'm working with a WS4904P.
So the Envisalink wires into the alarm panel and lets you use your wired and wireless zones as devices in Hubitat or most other hubs for that matter. It's basically an interpreter for the alarm system. I have a Vista 21ip with 2 zone expanders. The Envisalink wires into the alarm panel using the red, black, green, yellow wires like your normal addressable keypad. There is also an ethernet port that connects it to your home network so you can talk to it with your Hubitat hub. You can send commands to it to arm and disarm your alarm or to get sensor triggers from each of the zones. I used zone doubling and the two zone expanders to split apart all the combined sensors to each have their own zone. This let me import each zone as a single device instead of a group of deviecs so I use them to trigger automations. You could leave windows grouped and just split out the motion sensors and doors and this would work fine also.
The sensors are designed to talk to the alarm system only. If you want to buy ZigBee stuff that'll be a lot easier but if you need a lot of sensors it may cost you quite a bit more than importing all of your alarm sensors depending on how it's wired.
I wanted to keep my alarm sensors because they are way cheaper to replace when they wear out at less than a dollar a sensor and I don't have to deal with batteries.
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