Unexpected AD benefit with RFX events
Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2018 6:08 pm
I have Alarmdecoder feeding into Home Assistant. I did this so Alarm events could control z-wave devices. A side benefit is that I can see my sensor RFX signals. I look at them so I can receive notifications when certain interior RF sensors trip while the panel is armed STAY, something the AD WebApp doesn't currently support.
Anyway, I noticed one of my sensors acting oddly. I use loop 1 and it's loop 2 was tripping, loop 1 also tripped when I operated the door it was attached to, but the loop 2 toggling behavior was inexplicable. The supervision bit was also toggling, and my sensor doesn't have a supervision setting (all its brothers in the house show supervision=false). At first I thought maybe it was a code bug, but there was another remote possibility - that there was another sensor in the area with the same SN. Since that remote possibility was easier for me to test, I did. I removed the sensor from my panel, pulled its battery, and captured the AD ser2sock output from a putty telnet connection for several hours. Sure enough, someone else in the area has a sensor with the same SN! Apparently the only reason we weren't setting off each other's alarms is because we're monitoring different loops. with 7 digits in the SN, there are 10,000,000 possible SNs. I also found over 380 unique SNs. Alarm salesman must have really made out when they passed through this area (I inherited from prior owner).
Troubleshooting this gremlin would have been impossible without AD's ability to see all RF sensors within range of the system's receiver. What a great product. Kudos to the developers as well as to whoever wrote the component for Home Assistant that talks to AD's ser2sock. With this kind of luck, I'm heading out to buy a lottery ticket right now.
Anyway, I noticed one of my sensors acting oddly. I use loop 1 and it's loop 2 was tripping, loop 1 also tripped when I operated the door it was attached to, but the loop 2 toggling behavior was inexplicable. The supervision bit was also toggling, and my sensor doesn't have a supervision setting (all its brothers in the house show supervision=false). At first I thought maybe it was a code bug, but there was another remote possibility - that there was another sensor in the area with the same SN. Since that remote possibility was easier for me to test, I did. I removed the sensor from my panel, pulled its battery, and captured the AD ser2sock output from a putty telnet connection for several hours. Sure enough, someone else in the area has a sensor with the same SN! Apparently the only reason we weren't setting off each other's alarms is because we're monitoring different loops. with 7 digits in the SN, there are 10,000,000 possible SNs. I also found over 380 unique SNs. Alarm salesman must have really made out when they passed through this area (I inherited from prior owner).
Troubleshooting this gremlin would have been impossible without AD's ability to see all RF sensors within range of the system's receiver. What a great product. Kudos to the developers as well as to whoever wrote the component for Home Assistant that talks to AD's ser2sock. With this kind of luck, I'm heading out to buy a lottery ticket right now.