DIY a Ring Alarm Killer Using Old Tech!
consumer home security systems they're all trash and I've tried a lot of them Abode was unreliable Simply Safe not much better Arlo was featuring complete oo nice airpods I've been using ring the last few years and it's been fine except for the horrid app and the fact that they went from charging $10 a month to $20 a month for 2025 I'm over it but here's a little sequel here's a little secret about alarm systems the security companies do not want you to know about because 99% of alarm signals are false positives and increasing number of police departments are just refusing to respond to alarm requests unless number one the property owner has filed for a permit most don't number two the call center comes from a Monitoring Center that has a contract with the given local police department many aren't and number three there's visual confirmation of trespass either from an on-site eyewitness like a neighbor or via camera feeds from inside the home but what if I told you that you could build your own alarm system using the same equipment used by Banks government buildings and businesses with rapid police action for just $5 per month and with smart home integration all for about the same same cost as one of those crappy off the-shelf consumer systems like ring would it sound too good to be true perhaps but it's not too good to be true check this out it all starts with well this a DSC alarm system released at the turn of the century that's been used for decades by professional companies like ADT I got my PC 1616 model for a few hundred bucks on eBay as a new inbox kit now you can purchase all of this stuff at retail from a bunch of different websites but buying lightly used or liquidated units at auction is the way to go if you ask me you'll save a lot of money now the essential components that you will need are the mainboard a keypad and a 16vt AC Transformer you'll also want a cheap sealed lead acid battery for backup power during outages plus an enclosure to house everything inside of now DSC isn't your only option the Honeywell Vista series is another time tested system known for reliability it often costs less than the DSC and is more easily available given it was designed for homes rather than for Enterprise installations like this now both systems have their own strengths and weaknesses their own fans and I will link some resources down below for you to research which one is best for your home that is if you're like me and you don't already have an abandoned system ready to be resurrected for a new era many lucky folks out there do and if you've got that just use it it's there smoke them if you got them welcome to my very ugly utility room as bestus tape and all and I'm going to try as best as I can to mount this panel in a way that makes sense there's really two tips I have for you the first tip is you want to choose a room that has fairly easy access to the rest of your house if you're choosing to wire sensors this room doesn't have any drywall on it I can access in between this level and my floor joist for the next level so I can run chases uh of of cabling there if I choose to do that and or if you're going Wireless which I am primarily doing we'll talk about that in a minute you want to have your wireless keypad which is actually what transmits and receives Wireless signals in an area where it's centrally located so it can reach the extremities of the home but you also want it to be because it's a keypad by an area that you choose to enter and exit from my garage door is right here which makes this the perfect space only problem this box I thought would be 16 in on Center it is not and I don't have a circular saw or any tools so I'm going to take this very old plywood shelf from this granny that used to own this home stick it on the wall and then Mount this to that I love this impact driver this is from Milwaukee it's an M12 it's their hydraulic driver and so it's actually very very quiet for being an impact but it's so tiny it has so much gumption and um you know you just I use it for everything drilling screwing and everything in between that's definitely enough but uh you know I don't know when you got screws why not use them going 96 and a 25 oh you want to do a little bit of work to try and make it such that your thief or burglar doesn't just come and rip all the cables out of the system now there are backups and preventions to make sure that things can still work even if that happens but you want to try your best to do some bit of guarding and protection for this panel a lot of real security alarm contractors will inset this into drywall or into plywood or into OSB which is really the best solution second best solution would be to make it such that there's a hole and then a big sheet of plywood on the wall so that they'd have to really go to work doing what I'm going to do is not at all ideal and it's not permanent I'm just doing it because I don't have any tools okay you know what they say use a level yeah it's pretty good ah that'll work security through not obscurity it's fairly visible I guess it's pretty high up if Joe Rogan was in here he'd be like come on give me that if you don't have a whole side you can just create a bunch of trophobia through which to push your wires okay speaking of wiring we've got some work to do at minimum we've got to wire up our DC battery we've got to wire up our AC input which comes from our 16vt AC Transformer this is a non-polarized input so it doesn't matter which cable goes into Which slot then you've got an ox/ Bell input these are utilized for a couple of of different things Ox is often used for smoke alarms and carbon monoxide sensors Bell is often used for as you might imagine bells or Sirens Sirens which can even use external power and get incredibly loud like this 30 WT outdoor siren that will wake up the whole neighborhood because again security is mostly deterrence and if you can deter people from breaking in with a huge horn loed siren on the side of your house and very very very loud noise that's frankly as good as the police next up you've got to wire up the red black yellow and green wires to your individual keypad that you're choosing to use and then each one of your wired zones so each sensor acts as its own Zone I have Zone one and then a C wire zone two shares that same C wire zone three to Comm zone four to Comm basically you're going to wire up any wired sensor that you choose to have the benefit to wired should be fairly obvious robustness at the end of the day these sensors are all just binary sensors they're normally open or they're normally closed they're like not like modern sensors where they've got weird old radios in them and Wi-Fi setup and Bluetooth and no it's just a switch that if there's continuity from one end to the other worky if not continuity from one end to the other not worky something wrong Sound the Alarm really really simple stuff and the benefit to this is that you can use third-party devices like the smoke detector I have it's not made by DSC it doesn't matter because it's just a switch it's either open or it's closed now the devices themselves might have their own onboard logic like these infrared motion detectors but in general they just send back yes or no to this board and that's what's so great about the way that this thing is set up so you can choose to wire as many zones as you want I'm not going to do that many because I don't have that much access this isn't a new construction I'm retrofitting this I'm going to wire up my keypad a smoke alarm um let's do a infrared sensor and maybe a glass brake sensor temperature sensor and then uh let's call it and let's make everything else Wireless cuz Wireless easy they say You're supposed to replace electronic spoke detectors about every 10 years but that one that one I think is gas powered I'm joking but it's so so old that it there's no way that it would work even with a new battery so I'm going to replace it with two new sensors we've got a glass brake and motion sensor here and then a smoke and temperature sensor here I'm just going to poke a big old hole through the wall and hopefully I can fish my cable back into this room shouldn't be hard keyword being shouldn't be okay hope hopefully we're not hitting a stud or duct work or electrical or Plumbing or send it I do think I hit the bottom of the duct work let's see hold on maybe not I need to do a little taperoo to my cable it's like flossy all right you'll notice I made one hole but I actually made two holes that's okay though because I am a genius you see most sensors are wired up with four wire alarm wire it's a 18 to 24 gauge usually and uh I didn't want to buy any of that so you know what it's the same gauge but puts eight wires in instead of just four ethernet Twisted pairs it's shielded it's going to be fine right here maybe yeah glass brake closer to the door motion captures both doors yeah I like that I can already see all the Europeans commenting but I kind of put the hole through my house yeah we'll get to wireless stuff here soon there's no cable cavity you're supposed to just jam it through one of these little holes I don't like that don't like that one bit but all you've got is a hammer everything is a nail this is so hard to fit in just like this segue to our sponsor just kidding that's actually really easy because the hoem I steady M7 smartphone gimbal is what you've seen all of the b-roll shots on so far let's start with the basics because this is a hoem gimbal it's packed with all of their standard Fair a 193 mm built-in extension pole for low angle shots group selfies and even fake drone moves if you got folded out tripod legs to rest the device or to frame a static shot and of course you can use the three AIS stabilization to keep everything buttery smooth during even the most complex of movements with a 500 G capacity it accommodates even the largest and heaviest phones in addition to external accessories like lights or microphones oh in that 360° pan rotation it is perfect for these wild Inception style shots next up is the detachable remote now with a color touchcreen because it's not just for controlling the gimbal it is a realtime preview screen so you can frame your shots perfectly without ever touching your phone but of course you can adjust gimbal settings right from the device itself the real magic though it's the advanced AI tracker unlike most gimbals this runs entirely on device you don't need to use an app or Bluetooth or worry about compatibility headaches it works with any app on any iOS or Android device you name it gesture controls are what make it so easy to start and stop tracking you just flash an okay sign or select your subject on the touchcreen remote and you can even use gestures to customize your framing whether it's a person a pet or even a moving car the tracker locks on and doesn't miss a beat oh and with its built-in CCT and RGB fill lights you can add cinematic flare at a moment's notice the hoem I steady M7 is a gimbal built for creators who want powerful features without restrictions and if you're ready to take stuff to the next level check out the video description below all right so now comes time to mount our keypad onto the wall and I've got a really good feeling there's probably a stud right right here there was a stud right there and now we will just open up our terminals to receive the wires we've got red blue black rather not blue we will just go W now we'll take this door and we'll go oh beautiful and then we'll take this plastic wrapp and go wow it looks like 2001 up in here honestly it does look 2004 I ain't joking this is the iMac G5 plastic or the G4 Cube no not that that was too early 1999 called they want their Square back luckily for homes where wiring isn't an option or isn't feasible everywhere these Wireless sensors are just awesome sure they're not as sexy as modern smart home sensors but because they're also binary triggered or not triggered they don't have to transmit effectively any data and so that allows them to operate at much lower radio frequencies than most zigg based consumer systems which operate at 2.4 GHz these bad boys operate at 433 mahz and as a consequence they will penetrate walls foundations and more with ease they also have a track record for being as reliable as wired sensors not something that can be said of consumer DIY systems okay we've got our wired and wireless sensors ready to go but how do we program them into the system all right I got to be honest this is one area where Modern app-driven Technologies handily surpass these older systems programming kind of sucks especially if you get sent the wrong keypad like me and you didn't notice until the day before your paternity leave DSC makes two keypads one with an alpha numeric LCD that walks you through menus and through other stuff and then there's another keypad that's Satan because it provides zero data on screen it's just a segmented display it just beats let me demonstrate okay so you've got to enter programming mode with star 8 and then you enter your installers code by default it's 5555 you're then asked for a section code what is this oh it's literally every single function of the entire system buried in numbered directories this is a device where you have definitely got to have your manual on hand luckily the manual is very good and uh it even provides step-by-step worksheets so for example I can type session code 006 okay that enters the installers code section where I can and should change the default pass password I'm going to change it to 1 2 3 4 okay easy right so how do you set up zones well all of my wired devices are ready to go because they're wired I do however have to establish a connection with my wireless devices by going into star 8 to enter programming mode five oh five five five that won't work we changed the password star 81 2 3 4 is our password okay come on star 8 1 2 3 4 there we go and now I enter section 804 this is Wireless enrollment mode okay uh let's say I want to program Zone 7 so I enter 07 and then I need to enter the electronic serial number of my sensor which is two 0 star 2 Star 933 it beeps at me wow great and then I push pound a bunch of times to get me back to the main menu and then I need to do that whole song and dance again get back into the menu and now I enter a section code 001 which allows me to set up the first 16 zones and I have to assign each Zone a Zone type this is yet another list that you can refer to but it's uh in the manual and it modifies the behavior of the alarm system when a specific zone is triggered so for example Zone type uh one starts a an entry delay when violated this is perfect for doors zone three activates instant alarms when tripped which is great for hallway motion sensors not found in between your door and key bad Zone type 7 is great for smoke detectors you get the idea now regardless of whether or not you actually have 16 wired zones you've got to program them all so in the event you don't have them populat like me you just do Zone code 0 0 which defines itself as unused so here we go okay section 001 and now the number roulette 0 five 03 08 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 05 01 01 01 01 03 88 0 0 0 0 and that's all there is to it again make sure you buy the 5500 and not the 5501 keypad that I have to save yourself a lot of frustration even though the feature set is technically the same through both of them and boy are there features like you can add End of Line resistors to detect if wired zones have been tampered with you can enable a dead man switch so that the alarm system will auto trigger if the keypad is removed or if the alarm door is opened and you can even set up a distress code so let's say a bad guy comes in it says turn off the alarm well you can enter a fake code that will disable the alarm but it will also call the police in the background and notify them that you're being held capture this is the nerdy stuff that commercial alarm systems can get you but okay all right hold your horses pal because congrats you've just built yourself a 30-year-old system that that is not monitored nor remotely controllable it's useless now you may have seen an rj11 phone line connector included in your box when you bought your panel yeah that Preposterous landline method of contacting the alarm company does us no good in 2025 so we are going to use a modern piece of Hardware designed to work with these old systems a tcpip based bus level interface this one is the invisalink 4 by Ison but there are a number of different companies that make this same thing for a managerie of old systems we install it into the panel in much the same way that we did the alarm system itself and we piggy back onto the keyboards bus wiring last we provide our new PCB with an ethernet cable and uh well we're done at least with the hardware theoretically because now comes time to enroll the device inside of our web-based Ison account and let's see if I can figure this out all by myself because I bought this without watching any tutorials or reading any manuals I push add system and Vis is a link card that's what I have a DSC system I have my Mac ID ready to go and then a device name we can call this snazzy Labs okay now we're truly in Uncharted Territory I haven't done anything new device sucessfully add it okay wow look at that so I can go to details and then wow okay so I can update the device oh error panel not connected check wiring or registered as wrong panel type that's not good well maybe it's just a a firmware thing let's update that request for firmware update is queued please allow up to 10 minutes for the request to be completed oh man this this web UI I got to admit is not the best I've ever seen hey I think it was a firmware update cuz check it out here it is snazzy Labs it's ready to go and I can arm the system remotely I didn't have to do anything it just like inherited all of my stuff now Zone activity it says there was a zone closed 13 minutes ago at Zone one that's my motion sensor so it closed 13 minutes ago because that's the last time we were downstairs but in theory I can just arm snazzy Labs I just heard the beep from the system that's amazing and disarm snazzy Labs okay and now I have to enter my code uh 1 two 3 4 I think I still have the default It beeped it worked okay so I've done nothing I've ah this is great I thought I was GNA have to go through and program all of my sensors uh it just adds itself to the system as if it's a secondary keypad except for it's completely remotely controllable over the web now Ison does have an app but it is absolutely heinous looking and I didn't do this solely because I wanted to connect it to the internet I wanted to connect it to the way that I'm used to connecting my existing ring system it's one of the good things that I like about it although not official home assistant support so I can put it inside of homekit and inside of my home app and guess what there is an Ison envis plugin for home assistant so I should be able to do the same thing I can't believe I was able to just add this this is fantastic and beyond that it looks like I can do a bunch of settings that I would otherwise have to do from the alarm panel like I can set user codes and PGM labels I can add devices and zones all from here no more having to with that crappy stupid keypad this is of my life okay this is very exciting there is a little bit of bad news this is a legacy integration for home assistant which means to say there is not a goey for when you're installing it you have to go and configure the uh configuration. yaml file from within home assistant which is kind of a pain in the butt but I'm quite dumb and inexperienced with this and I was able to do it fairly easily uh with the help of chat GP and the documentation and if we come into my overview we can see that I can arm and disarm my panel we can see two binary sensors and that's because again time is of the essence here and that's all I've done but all I am going to have to do is just go through the rest of my list and say Zone you know seven is this and this is what it is and it adds that as a binary sensor inside of Home assistant which then I can down here say hey oh great put that into homekit so then all I have to do is go to my notifications here I'm going to open my phone and say add access and then I scan that QR code from home assistant I say add that bridge and I'm going to say that's down in the utilities room and the bridge name has been added and device entities are going to begin adding so front door I'm going to continue I'm going to say that's at uh well I haven't set up my rooms for this office yet let's say that's also in utilities front door it's going to say what type of sensor is this because it's just recognized as a contact sensor it's a door so I'm going to say continue continue hey motion sensor yep that's also in the utilities room downstairs downstairs motion continue and that should be it but now oh and the security system yes utilities as well continue continue I'm recommended automations to set up I will not do that right now but now if I go down to the utilities room you will see that I can arm and disarm the snazzy lab system I can see the door State and the Motion state of the sensors and let's go try them I'm so excited and now for the Moment of Truth when I open the door I should get a state change reflected inside of my homekit app and there it goes so it's slightly delayed but it's pretty quick and I bet I could make it faster but even cooler I can come into the security Tab and I can press away and in the same amount of time the system starts to count down I didn't really talk about monitoring this was getting long on the tooth but you can buy monitoring from invisalink for about $8.50 per month if you want to get it even cheaper though you can use alarmo and the power of Home assistant to self-c contract your own monitoring service for less than $5 per month we're talking a fraction of what Simply Safe ring and others charge with the robustness of a commercial home security system but with the modern smart home Integrations that you seek it's so cool and frankly I thought the sensors were going to be like not very good cuz they're 20 years old uh-uh that motion sensor is as reliable as any motion sensor I've ever used and it's fantastic that's all from me if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't that other button works okay too the next time you'll see me I'll be a dad I'm actually technically already a dad right now which is pretty cool um I'm talking to you from the past in the future stay snazzy wasn't that a piece of cake get the LCD so if I want to run multiple sensors through the same cable I can even though it's not technically the same cable but I just wire it once and I'm set I'm a genius wow they should pay me all the money in the world please subscribe
2025-02-15 07:45
