My first Node-RED flow, which has been running reliably for a few months. The primary purpose of this flow was to provide real-time zone state updates (PIR movement detected; door open) from an Orisec alarm panel to Home Assistant via MQTT discovery. Orisec alarm panels are becoming increasingly popular in the UK, and the inspiration for this flow was to mimic the functionality of the popular Texecom2MQTT integration for Home Assistant by emulating the Orisec Android app.
Note - I have not attempted to establish how the Android app constructs the UDP payload requests to the alarm panel. Instead I am simply sending the same UDP payloads via Node-RED and interpreting the response messages (see Config below).
- Panel States (armed/disarmed)
- Full armed/disarmed/night-armed commands
- Improved documentation
- Home Assistant
- MQTT integration
- Node-RED addon for Home Assistant
- Orisec controlPlus Android App (iOS untested)
- Packet analyser software (eg Wireshark)
- MQTT explorer - useful rather than essential
The following requests occur in sequence:
- Initiate Connection (PIN sent to panel)
- Fetch panel serial
- Fetch supporting info (model no, etc.)
- Fetch Zone names (see below)
- Fetch Zone Config (MQTT binary sensor)
- Fetch Zones States (ON/OFF - repeat every 4 secs)
Each request has a unique payload which is defined as an environment variable against the flow (for ease of admin). These can be obtained by analysing the UDP packets sent (as a hex string) between a device running the Android app and the Alarm panel.
Zones names are fetched in batches of 10. My alarm system contains 13 zones (combination of PIRs, PAs, Door/window sensors), therefore I am sending two requests (i) Zones 1-10, (ii) Zones 11-20, and adding these to a zone array. In theory this could be extended for 20+ zones but I have no way to test this. A single request is subsequently made to fetch states for all zones.