I have been so excited to receive my board ever since I first found out about Konnected on a podcast. I recently got into SmartThings a year ago and have slowly been expanding my connected home. I looked for something similar to this a while ago but never found this product until a few weeks before the Kickstarter campaign. I was one of the first 30 backers and I have my board up and running great! I have a brand new home that came prewired with a standard alarm panel that I never had registered but sometimes I would still arm when we left the house, but did not think about much. Now all my prewired sensors are in smarthings and I have the home monitor working great!
Here are some tips and things that I messed up during my installation:
1) Make sure to connect your Konnected board to the same wifi your hub is on. I know it makes sense but during installation I connected the board to my guest wifi (as I do with most of my IoT devices for security reasons) and then got stuck because SmartThings could not find the board. This problem was solved by disabling my guest network so when the board booted up it would restart the network process when it couldn't find the network.
2) Sensors need to be wired in a series, not parallel. I am a novice when it comes to sensor installation and didn't even think that this would be an issue. I am so used to wiring everything in parallel I didn't know why my window sensors would not work. This was only an issue because I put all my homes windows in one zone to make room for the piezo buzzer, and when I connected the first and second floor window sensors together I kept wiring them parallel and wasted about 2 hours before I realized the issue.
3) If you want the piezo buzzer, it counts as a zone. This is probably my largest gripe with the Konnected board. I had pre-planned everything out as far as zones go when I made my order and was glad I only needed one board. When I received the board and was planning out my wiring I realized I was going to have to combine two zones (I chose my window sensors) to make room for the buzzer. I wish the board had a dedicated pin for the buzzer that didn't count against your zones kind of like the siren.
After I worked out those minor issues I have my board up and running smoothly! I really like the flexibility of the SmartThings Home Monitor. For example I have my "Armed Away" mode set to turn off all the lights, set the alarm system, and turn on a Wyze Cam I have connected to a zwave plug in the living room. The whole system disarms upon the arrival of my phone with a push notification to verify when I pull up to my driveway. I love that the Wyze Cam turns on only when my alarm is set because I don't like the camera recording when we are home and this is a nice compromise.
Also, I decided to power the Konnected board via my 12 Volt DC Output of my current alarm system for 2 reasons. One is that I can still utilize the build in battery backup, and two because there is no A/C plug in the box so I would have to run a wire up the wall. I simply cut the included DC adapter and stripped the wires and connected them to the output of my board. Also note that on the included DC adapter the white striped wire is negative even though typically the stripe means a positive wire.
