Report offline Konnected board

Smart Home Integrations HomeKit (via Homebridge/HOOBS)
1

Hello Fabulous Team Konnected,

I'm wondering if there is any way for the Homebridge plugin to detect when a Konnected board is offline and report the status in Homekit?

Right now, I have two boards inn daily use and one of them was inadvertently switched off. It does not show that it is 'not responding' in Homekit and I had no idea it was offline until I happened to casually notice it was powered off.

I was thinking perhaps a dummy contact sensor could be added in HB as a type of 'deadman switch' i.e. normally closed until the board goes offline. Perhaps this sensor could then be used in a Homekit automation to trigger an alarm and serve as an anti-tamper measure.

Otherwise, v1.1.4 seems to be working well on my V1 and V2 (+add-on) boards on the back of a Bosch Solution 3000 - thanks very much!

2

This is an interesting concern, I'm wondering if there's a better way to handle this.


The way that Konnected alarm panels work (with multiple different panels all reporting under one alarm system), and the limitations to the way that HomeKit represents when devices are offline as you point out, make it difficult to present this in any sort of proper obvious way without using accessories for things that aren't really the right accessory for the task. In some cases for certain IoT devices, people have used things like the Fan accessory for a Vacuum in HomeKit because HomeKit doesn't have an official Vacuum accessory in their device lineup.


There are a couple of other things I would like to think about:

  1. Should the Konnected mobile app be monitoring and provide notifications on the phone when a panel is reporting offline?
  2. Should/could we be sending notifications of offline devices via email or text to a specified contact address or number? Would Konnected handle this on their side with a mail sending service, or would we offload those requests to a person's personal email account through providing SMTP credentials to their email address? (thinking about avoiding having to manage SPF and mail spam/authentication).
  3. Can the HomeKit Security System Accessory tile report "Not Responding" and yet still maintain a certain state (have a status of Away, or Home/Stay or Night mode)?
  4. I do know that there are HomeKit Security System characteristics for Fault and Tampered, I'm wondering how we can leverage those to address some of this.


Ultimately I would like to noodle on this for a little bit too and do some research before netting out on a final approach.


// Mike

3

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply. I like your thinking.

Here is some food for thought:


Caveat: I’m not a software developer and haven’t reviewed the HB or HK APIs. So forgive my noob terminology and presumption.


A few observations:

When the Konnected panel goes offline, the Alarm and any associated automations continue to function in Homekit/Homebridge (Arm/Disarm/Trigger, Switches, etc). This is good because even if the Konnected panel is offline other sensors, automations and triggers continue to run as expected (as long as HB, HK and wifi are operational).


A case example: I have a bunch of Zigbee door and window sensors as well as HomePod ‘alerts’ that supplement the sensors and sirens provided by my traditional alarm panel with Konnected interface. The Zigbee sensors still function and trip the HK alarm even if Konnected is offline. 


When the plugin is disabled and HB rebooted, HK displays ‘Updating’ on the tile, then ‘No Response’ after a minute or so.

The alarm accessory no longer functions in HK - status cannot be changed or updated and I doubt an automation would trigger alarm state.

What this leads me to believe is that there is some mechanism between HB & HK that monitors status of accessories (like a ‘heartbeat’).

I’m not sure what use that observation is right now.


One thought I did have:

I’ve looked into some HB plug-ins that provide an occupancy sensor based on local network presence, changing the occupancy state based on a periodic network ping response from a Konnected panel’s (static)IP or MAC address. The period interval might not be sufficient for a ‘tamper’ state, but perhaps suitable as a ‘fault’ state.

I haven’t tested any of these plugins yet, but theoretically a notification could be triggered if presence is not detected. 

Triggering notifications also presents a challenge. I notice that only a few accessories can trigger HK push notifications and are limited to hardcoded message. E.g. Notification for arm/disarm, or in the example of a lock: lock/unlock. Perhaps Smoke/CO2 etc sensors also support this. 

Perhaps the Konnected plugin could present one of these sensors/accessories to represent a fault/tamper/heartbeat state (one per Konnected panel).

I have seen HK display a fault/battery low/tamper state on the tile and in 'home status', but not with notifications.


I’m guessing your proposed Noonlight integration would benefit from some sort of status monitoring.

I like your suggestion that the Konnected panel can trigger an alert email/sms/push notification, presumably via back-end/cloud servers, although that would add a dependency on internet connection and cloud processing that I was trying to minimise with HB/Konnected (I’ve migrated from SmartThings for this reason). Not a show stopper though.


Again, thanks for a great plugin - I love your work!

Shaun.