Installation/Documentation?

[no1knows]

Hello,

Really interested in this project. Hoping to getting my Texecom Premier Elite 48 panel integrated with Home Assistant running on a rpi.

I have a Pi Zero connected to the panel on a Com Port set to Crestron. I'm hoping to be able to interface to that and communicate alarm/zone status to Home Assistant over MQTT.

Are you able to share some basic installation instructions?

Really appreciate any help.

Cheers

[bakasdim]

Same here! Would you be willing to provide info about the components needed to make this work? Do I need a comIP module?

Thanks a lot

[RoganDawes]

It seems to me that the system here is intended to be installed on a microcontroller that is part of the Particle ecosystem, and it then bridges the Crestron protocol to mqtt, allowing it to integrate with any home automation system, such as Hone Assistant.
Without having looked at the circuit boards, you would need a level converter, because the Texecom alarm is 5V TTL, while both the Pi Zero and the Particle hardware are 3v3.
I guess some reading of code is required to figure out things like how to configure the pin code to access the panel, which mqtt server to connect to, as well as which topics are available to monitor and control the panel.
I currently have an Orange Pi Zero acting as a cheap COM IP, but as far as I can tell, you either need to port this software to run on Linux or some other platform, or get a Particle dev board to play with. I don’t think that a COM IP would do the trick, but I could be mistaken.

[JumpMaster]

Wow I missed this. Just seen the latest reply notification.

Yes this is designed to be installed on Particle device. Was originally developed on a Photon and is now using an Argon. The Fritzing circuit design is in the PCB folder. All components are labelled.

No need for a ComIP or smartcom although I do have a smartcom which I rarely use thanks to this. It connects directly to the Texecom motherboard and uses the 12v supply for power.

I use Home Assistant to control this over the Mosquito MQTT broker. No reason to use Mosquito over any other but it is the most popular.

[RoganDawes]

Ah, I see the Particle Photon's serial port is 5V-tolerant, which makes it unnecessary to worry about level converters. That's excellent! And in fact, the Photon actually has a second UART available, although its use is not recommended.

I'm actually looking to port this to an ESP32, either using the Arduino framework, or the esp-idf framework. The neat thing about the ESP32 is that is has 3 physical UART ports, which can be reassigned to various ports, meaning I can connect one port to the panel on Serial port 1, configured as a COM-IP, or even a USB-COM, and can reprogram it as needed, as well as having a second ESP32 UART connected to the panel on Serial port 2, configured for the Crestron protocol. This seems like the best of both worlds, as some features of the COM-IP/USB-COM are unavailable via the Crestron protocol, for example reconfiguring the panel itself. The 3rd UART could be used to talk to a GSM modem, for instance, although my primary objective was just to avoid using the primary UART which is used to program the ESP32, and which spits out a bootloader message whenever it starts up. This is likely to confuse the panel, even though the bootloader message is sent at 74880 baud or something like that.

[RoganDawes]

Do you have any documentation for the Crestron protocol that I can look at? It would be nice to know exactly what is possible. Is it information only, essentially a one-way protocol? Or can you issue instructions with it too?

[JumpMaster]

I received the documentation from Texecom under NDA so I am unable to share it.

The Crestron protocol mostly involves push updates from the alarm. Every-time a zone is triggered (whether armed or not) or when the alarm status is changed, a command is sent from the alarm system. The other protocols involved querying the alarm system on a regular basis to get similar information. For write operations there is a virtual keypad you can navigate using all the keys you have on a physical keypad. I used that in this application to arm and disarm the system.

This post for OpenHab may also be useful.
https://community.openhab.org/t/how-to-integrate-oh-with-a-texecom-alarm-system/38703

[RoganDawes]

Thanks for the information and the link. I'll see what I can figure out independently :-D