Ubiquiti VS elkm1

Another neat idea is to connect all “smart” equipment to an isolated vlan and separate wifi that can still be seen by your normal network devices.

For example if your wifi was called “Home”, an additional “Home-IoT” is for every device.

The IoT devices can then be set to not sniff your network, or even connect out if you want.

A good example of this is in this EdgeRouter setup guide, which is a pretty decent guide on how to plan a home network for more than just basic home browsing.

https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti/blob/master/Ubiquiti%20Hom...

One extra step I’ve learned to follow is to verify if needed, could the hardware be permanently redirected to a local server, and worst case reflagged with a different firmware or it can be redirected to remain local. The latter is sometimes easier if it’s a Tuya based device, which a lot of these unknown devices are.

https://github.com/make-all/tuya-local

One of the main things these “smart” devices do is use your internet connection. It’s wise to create a dedicated _IoT suffixed wifi which can’t access your network or devices, but at the same time your other devices can ping them.

How?

This is a pretty solid guide of a home network setup here. It can be running a $50 EdgeRouter X or translated to other devices.

https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti

I followed this guy on Youtube and this guide on github to set up an Edge Router X. It was cheap and does all this, but was harder than I thought it would be to set up, even with a video guide.

ratgdo looks really nice! I've been controlling my garage door via dry contact on my Elk security system [1] and monitoring the door status via a separate rolling door reed sensor. [2] But from following the ratgdo link, I learned that my "Security+ 1.0" garage door opener has a RS-232 interface with a protocol that will tell you about door status and obstructions. That's better!

I just clicked the buy link on the ratgdo thing to support the nice, well-documented open-source [3] project. In truth though I have the right hardware sitting around here already, so I might just use that depending on how long the "back ordered" status lasts...

[1] There's a Home Assistant integration for the Elk M1 Gold with some Python library; I also have my own WIP Rust library for interacting with it here: <https://github.com/scottlamb/elkm1>

[2] something like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Gebildet-Security-Rolling-Magnetic-Ap...

[3] docs at <https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/> but the actual code is in a separate repo at <https://github.com/ratgdo/esphome-ratgdo>

I own one. It's good but not perfect. Some complaints:

* The protocol has a lot of oddities. E.g. it sends out spurious "fully armed" messages when it's actually in the process of arming [1] so a good integration has to debounce these. (The one built into Home Assistant doesn't, last I checked. It just reports weird states. iirc it will even say "arming" long after the panel is fully armed.) The command to disarm remotely only works if the user whose code is supplied is configured in a particular way. (Can't find the reference for this right now.)

* The remote programming tool is a flaky VB.NET app. The protocol for this part isn't documented, although I've reverse-engineered part of it.

fwiw, I have a work-in-progress Rust crate for talking with the Elk. It can be used as an alternate Home Assistant integration via MQTT. [2]

I can definitely see the appeal of rolling your own. One problem though is that I think when talking to an alarm company, the panel is supposed to be certified in some way, which would be a significant barrier for a hobbyist design.

[1] https://www.elkproducts.com/forums/topic/spurious-armed-full...

[2] https://github.com/scottlamb/elkm1