DSC Alarm + Envisalink3 + DSCServer + SONOS = Alarm Announcements!

Image courtesy of antpkr at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Long title and a large degree of entropy? Nah! This is a system that was built in layers but the components are largely used and fairly niche in their use. I’ve just decided that I’d use them to provide something even more niche, an alarm zone announcer for my house. Sounds cool to you then keep on reader, otherwise go back to your other boring business reading materials…

This all started when my wife and I decided to buy our “forever” home. A wonderful home on a bit of land in the city where our families lived, thus, the “forever” home label. The problem with our forever home is that it’s a 2 and 1/2 story home and I’m always concerned with security, mainly the security of my family while we are home. I could really care less about someone stealing my junk as long as my family is safe. I wanted a way to ensure we would be aware if someone entered our home while we were home, awake or sleeping.

Long story short, I purchase a DSC Powerseries PC1864 system and the wireless sensors to put on each door and window. After we moved in and I got the system operational I realized the hectic process of leaving each morning would likely result in the alarm not getting armed so I sought out a way to remotely view and control it. I found the Envisalink3 card for my system. Nice little tool but the software is massively lacking in both features and security (no SSL for goodness sakes). That led me to the DSCServer software written for Android and Linux by MikeP. Great product and was the last piece to the puzzle for me….

Well, that was until I noticed my in-laws ADT system had a cool feature which would verbalize the zones that get opened…I loved that so much more than the beep…beep…beep my system made when a door was opened while the alarm was disarmed. Searching the interwebs left me empty, nothing was available to plug into my security system to give me that same awesome feature, I guess I’d have to roll my own. That’s where my SONOS system (a total of 5 speakers) comes into play, it’s got a wonderful full-featured API and it only took a few minutes to find a full-featured PHP library to control my system.

I leveraged the same raspberry pi that I was using for DSCServer to run apache2 and fixed up a nice PHP page which would announce which zone was opened based on a query string parameter passed to it. I then added an action for each zone in DSCServer to call the URL with the correct query string value for each zone. Volia! My SONOS speakers will quickly pause, a nice British lady will announce which zone was opened, and then the speaker goes back to whatever it was doing before the announcement.

I’m hard to please and this solution while dependent on layers of technology, works exceedingly well. There is a 2-4 second delay in the announcement which I’m strongly suspecting is the lack of power on my Raspberry Pi running DSCServer. I’m going to upgrade it to a Raspberry Pi 2 and see if I can reduce the lag time some. Otherwise, this project is complete.

As always, I believe knowledge should be free and freely shared. The PHP page I wrote is attached to this post for all to use. I’ve also linked below to the components I used (I’m not endorsing any retailer, it’s just where I purchased).

DSC Powerseries Alarm & Envisalink3

DSCServer Software For Envisalink3

SONOS Speakers (I have several Play3s and Play1s)

SONOS PHP Library