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The home security industry is, in general, horribly manipulative. They make money on fear and customer lock-in (subscriptions). As such there appears to be litt

by kabdib 15y ago

The home security industry is, in general, horribly manipulative. They make money on fear and customer lock-in (subscriptions). As such there appears to be little pressure to adopt advances in tech, to cost-reduce, or to make things easy and friendy for end-users. The systems are complex and baroque, and there is a reason for it. There's probably room for disruption here. I imagine a lot of the roadblocks to this will be regulatory, such as if you integrate fire alarm systems or devices that are hooked to phone lines. The two weekends I spent wiping, reverse-engineering and reconfiguring an old ADT installation really made me want to design boards and write firmware again.

larrys 15y ago
"probably room for disruption here. I imagine a lot of the roadblocks to this will be regulatory" Sensors --> Control Panel --> App|Txt Message An opportunity for sure. I own two of these Elk Gold Panels: http://www.elkproducts.com/product-catalog/m1-gold-cross-platform-control http://www.elkproducts.com/product-catalog/m1-gold-cross-pla... Complete with http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html software you can essentially cut out the online monitoring and phone lines and simply do everything over the internet. So I don't pay anything for monitoring. You could actually easily write your own software since the M1 spits out codes in real time and responds to commands that you can send over ssh. Anyway the way I have this setup I can be notified of any event (say even someone walks into and trips a motion sensor) by an email or text message. You could even do a phone call or notify multiple people. And you can remotely turn on and turn off zones, the system, and fully program this to do just about anything. There isn't anything magical Elk is doing. And I've spoken to their top tech guy and he didn't even know how to troubleshoot an SMTP problem. I would imagine a good kickstarter project could easily duplicate the same hardware functionality. The security vendor of course pushed the monitoring. I have some experience in that business so I didn't feel that I needed a central station. I just wanted to be notified. You can easily integrate any types of controllers with this (like an X10) and video cameras etc. Bottom line: There are tons of people with legacy alarm systems. Even just a hardware device that sat on the existing analog POTS line and sent the signals over the Internet to a place that would then send a txt message to a users phone would be a good place to start.
- DavidAdams 15y ago
  +1 on the Elk M1 Gold. If you're a hacker, you should definitely buy the haker's security system. You can then choose what kind of monitoring you'd like. I go with a local independent security monitoring company that costs about $8 per month. You can also set it up for self-monitoring. I wrote a review of the Elk M1 a while back: http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_Elk_M1_Home_Security_System http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_El...
  - larrys 15y ago
    Great article. I ended up having to buy a laptop PC because you can't run the Elk software for config on a Mac under boot camp etc. One thing to point out to anyone using a security company to install this. My installer left the system password less and you could telnet into it. In his mind he thought he had secured it. Simply going outside our network and using telnet you could get right in though which is how I checked what he said (he didn't know enough to do that). I'd imagine there are quite a few of these open ports right now out there.
sshumaker 15y ago
The reason these systems are so awful is that the home security companies out there are basically sales and distribution organizations. They don't understand product, they don't get tech, but there aren't any alternatives out there right now, so they keep generating massive profits. And their distribution channel (sending professional installers out to your home) reinforces the whole problem - they need pricey contracts to recoup the cost of installation, and upgrading customers costs them thousands of dollars. There's definitely room for disruption here, and that's exactly what we're trying to do at elarm (http://elarm.com http://elarm.com). (PS - we're hiring)
- kabdib 15y ago
  Good luck. I'd be happy to see the likes of Ademco / Honeywell clobbered, hard :-)

by kabdib 15y ago

larrys 15y ago

"probably room for disruption here. I imagine a lot of the roadblocks to this will be regulatory" Sensors --> Control Panel --> App|Txt Message An opportunity for sure. I own two of these Elk Gold Panels: http://www.elkproducts.com/product-catalog/m1-gold-cross-platform-control http://www.elkproducts.com/product-catalog/m1-gold-cross-pla... Complete with http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html software you can essentially cut out the online monitoring and phone lines and simply do everything over the internet. So I don't pay anything for monitoring. You could actually easily write your own software since the M1 spits out codes in real time and responds to commands that you can send over ssh. Anyway the way I have this setup I can be notified of any event (say even someone walks into and trips a motion sensor) by an email or text message. You could even do a phone call or notify multiple people. And you can remotely turn on and turn off zones, the system, and fully program this to do just about anything. There isn't anything magical Elk is doing. And I've spoken to their top tech guy and he didn't even know how to troubleshoot an SMTP problem. I would imagine a good kickstarter project could easily duplicate the same hardware functionality. The security vendor of course pushed the monitoring. I have some experience in that business so I didn't feel that I needed a central station. I just wanted to be notified. You can easily integrate any types of controllers with this (like an X10) and video cameras etc. Bottom line: There are tons of people with legacy alarm systems. Even just a hardware device that sat on the existing analog POTS line and sent the signals over the Internet to a place that would then send a txt message to a users phone would be a good place to start.

DavidAdams 15y ago
+1 on the Elk M1 Gold. If you're a hacker, you should definitely buy the haker's security system. You can then choose what kind of monitoring you'd like. I go with a local independent security monitoring company that costs about $8 per month. You can also set it up for self-monitoring. I wrote a review of the Elk M1 a while back: http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_Elk_M1_Home_Security_System http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_El...
- larrys 15y ago
  Great article. I ended up having to buy a laptop PC because you can't run the Elk software for config on a Mac under boot camp etc. One thing to point out to anyone using a security company to install this. My installer left the system password less and you could telnet into it. In his mind he thought he had secured it. Simply going outside our network and using telnet you could get right in though which is how I checked what he said (he didn't know enough to do that). I'd imagine there are quite a few of these open ports right now out there.

sshumaker 15y ago

The reason these systems are so awful is that the home security companies out there are basically sales and distribution organizations. They don't understand product, they don't get tech, but there aren't any alternatives out there right now, so they keep generating massive profits. And their distribution channel (sending professional installers out to your home) reinforces the whole problem - they need pricey contracts to recoup the cost of installation, and upgrading customers costs them thousands of dollars. There's definitely room for disruption here, and that's exactly what we're trying to do at elarm (http://elarm.com http://elarm.com). (PS - we're hiring)

kabdib 15y ago
Good luck. I'd be happy to see the likes of Ademco / Honeywell clobbered, hard :-)