Federico Lucifredi wrote:
Anyone has a good recommendation for a home security system that is
friendly to getting poked around by enterprising geeks?
No, but I looked into this last Summer.
The security industry is one of those stogy industries resisting modern
advances, like Internet communications, in part for justifiable reasons
of reliability, but also probably because they have a vested interest in
their current solutions that require both more costly hardware and
monitoring services.
If you're just looking for a bit of security functionality tacked on to
a home automation platform, there are options, but the reliability won't
be the same, and the ability to work with a UL listed monitoring service
won't be there (which may be relevant if you are seeking an insurance
discount).
I did run across a few hacker projects for monitoring pro alarm
equipment with your own gear, such as a project that lets an Asterisk
software PBX receive "Contact ID" format alarm notification messages.
http://www.markturner.net/2008/04/01/monitoring-alarm-panels-with-asterisk/
http://www.shaneyoung.com/asterisk/alarmreceiver/
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+cmd+AlarmReceiver
(Asterisk does make use of Perl.)
At least one pro monitoring service company has hacked the Linksys PAP2T
VoIP interface so that it receives Contact ID signals and retransmits
them digitally over the net to their monitoring computers:
https://nextalarm.com/services.jsp
It isn't clear whether they did this with cooperation of Linksys or by
modifying GPL code (I don't recall if the PAP2T uses GPL code), but they
don't make any code available. I tried asking them whether their PAP2T
could be reprogrammed to contact my server instead of theirs if I
wanted, and got no reply.
This approach also provides no remote control capabilities of the panel,
which you can get from a few panels that offer specialized network
interfaces. The "Contact ID" protocol (essentially DTMF tones) is pretty
antiquated, and really any modern alarm panel ought to have an Ethernet
jack and use a more modern protocol (for which there isn't a standard,
as far as I know), but only a few panels have a high-cost add-on network
interface available.
There's potentially a market for a Linux-based alarm panel that uses
wireless sensors from one of the major manufacturers (GE for example),
includes a modem for backwards compatibility with old style monitoring
services, as well as an Ethernet jack and support for one or more modern
TCP-based communication protocols for notifications and interactive control.
Try posting your question to alt.security.alarms. The regulars there
were moderately helpful, though being in the industry, you'll typically
get recommendations to stay away from any technologies that stray from
the traditional.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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