Short version:
Can one of the Alarmdecoder products tell me, in near real time, the status of the various zones in the house?
Longer version:
I have a Honeywell Vista 15p with 3 (basic) keypads and 24 zones. (It came with the house)
The keypads only sequentially blink the numbers of the open zones 13 19 7 12 21 22 11 and so on, over and over again. As an old man with a failing memory, it's tough to remember what zone corresponds to what number.
So I hooked up an Arduino and LCD to the keybus. When the Arduino sees "Fault 17", the LCD displays "Basement door open". Basically, there's a big lookup table.
The problem comes when there are lots of open zones. You have to sit there quite a while waiting for all the messages to blink by .. 3 to 4 seconds per zone. So you run around closing things and then go back to the panel and wait some more.
There does not seem to be a way, from just reading the keypad bus, to get all the zone information at one go, which seems ridiculous to me. My old DSC panels did this, but the supposedly better Honeywell panels can't?
So, I'm prepared to rip the Honeywell stuff out and replace it, but before I do, I thought I'd check into other hardware options.
Can one of the Alarmdecoder products give me this information? Can I send the panel a "tell me what's open" message and get a single, all encompassing reply? If so, how?
I'm having trouble determining these answers from what documentation I can find.
Thanks for any thoughts.
