Following up on the previous post about pulling sensor data from sensors in a Verisure alarm system, here is a slightly more hardware focused post.
The Verisure – USB – ESP8266 sandwich
One use case that the new Verisure alarm system does not handle nicely is machine-to-machine notification when the alarm is disarmed (turned off). Such notifications are sent to the mobile app – so the data exists somewhere. The problem is that it’s all undocumented and thus hard to build something on top of.
Let’s hack a solution instead – be aware, some soldering required….
Continuing from the previous post about publishing data from Telldus Live to MQTT, here is small piece of related Node-RED code. It outputs a list of all (wirelessly controlled) 220V/mains switches I have linked to Telldus Live, using a Tellstick Net.
The background of the code was simply that I wanted a convenient way of getting a complete list of all devices (switches, dimmers, door bells, …) known to my Telldus Live account. When testing different devices, moving them around, renaming them etc, it is very easy to loose track of which device does what, and what their respective IDs are. This little function solves that quite nicely.
Telldus has a set of nice little gadgets (“Tellstick”, for short) that both allow you to control remote switches over radio (433.92 MHz), and to read sensors transmitting on that same frequency. Telldus also has a backend service, Telldus Live, which offer Tellstick users scheduling features (turning lamps on/off at certain times, or when certain conditions occur), as well as showing the latest sensor readings.
The above is at least true if you have a Tellstick Net, which connects to your home network and sends device and sensor data to the Telldus Live service. You can also achieve the same thing with the non-connected Tellstick models, and an always-on computer running Telldus’ software.
Anyway – let’s assume that Telldus Live can see your switches, sensors and other connected devices. Would it not be cool if you could bring all that data into Node-RED, and from there create whatever feature you dreamt of.
How about sending an SMS when the garage door is still open, but your presence data indicate that you have left for work? Easy.
Or the opposite: Send a tweet to your Node-RED server, which will then fire off an event to Telldus Live, turning a switch on, and by doing so closing the garage door? No problem.
