Comfort UPNP <-> SmartThings <-> Amazon Echo

[mattbrain]

Hey Ben

That should work, as I mentioned earlier, it would be useful to know whether the Alexa on the Pi does support UPNP. I should have some time later this week to implement a WeMo emulator and send it across for you to test prior to getting your UCM/Ethernet.

What Comfort interfaces do you need to have exposed, currently I have zones and outputs (as per the screenshots below from SmartThings). The Alarm status and arming is a work in progress. 

As an added bonus I have also added IFTTT support via the maker channel for zones and outputs which allows them to trigger events on IFTTT, which can be configured on a per zone/output basis, but haven\'t yet implemented any IFTTT functions (so IFTTT can\'t initiate actions on the alarm).

I have attached four images from the SmartThings interface, the first one shows a typical room with Comfort zone and outputs (which are PIR\'s and lights respectively).



The second image shows an output device control interface, which shows the functions which can be performed on the output (On, Off, Flash Once, Flash the final icon being a toggle to enable IFTTT)


The third image is the same for a zone, with functions to enable the IFTTT maker or bypass the zone.


The final image is an illustration of a zones history as viewed in the App.

[mattbrain]

The link to Alexa in my implementation is via SmartThings, which exposes the devices in the Alexa app after being discovered via \'Alexa, discover my devices\':





From there, I have grouped them together into logical groups, as below:





Allowing me to say \'Alexa, turn on the side passage lights\'.


For an installation which isn\'t going to use SmartThings, I need to modify the UPNP to support emulate a device supported natively - I think WeMo lights, sockets, switches and motion sensors are best suited for this - they are widely supported and simple enough to easily emulate - it does mean that some of the advanced functions (such as zone bypass) aren\'t available as the range of functions per device is limited - but if all you are after is to interact with the alarm in a basic manner (react to zones, interact with outputs, set / unset the alarm) it should be more than sufficient.

[cgiltrow]

Hi Matt,

This looks great!  I wrote (and published in these forums) an interface into Comfort using VB and have been wanting to rewrite it in node.js for a while.  I would like to see what you have done and can possibly contribute.

Thanks,

Clinton.

[mattbrain]

Hey Clinton

I would welcome your feedback, and having more people try this out should certainly help with fleshing out the functionality.

I\'m going to do a bit of tidying up of the code later this week (as its a bit scruffy atm) and then pop it onto GitHub. It does has some dependencies on other node modules (some of which I have had to modify as they were only partial implementations) so the install process is a little tortuous but I\'m hoping to have those changes merged back into the main branch.

I\'ll put a link on the first entry of this topic once I have uploaded it along with some other tools to help with determining third party compatibility.

Thanks,

Matt

[benchan001]

Hi Matt,

These are excellent screenshots showing the Comfort Outputs.

Just wanted to see how you selected Smartthings as your central hub.

Have you considered a RPi 3 implementation?

My RPi 3s will be arriving next week and I look forward to testing your UPNP Comfort interface.

All the Best,

Ben

[mattbrain]

Hi Ben

You ask a good question about why I am using SmartThings.

I was lucky enough to be a beta tester in the UK and got one for free! However, now i have it, i would happily pay retail price for it - it allows me to connect a wide range of devices via the local network, z-wave, zigbee and devices exposed on the internet via o-auth.

The way I view this is Comfort provides a robust platform to monitor my house (intruders, fire etc) and SmartThings adds-on complex home automation which is vendor independent and open.

Combining the 2 allows me to make use of the status reports and control exposed by Comfort in a more complex home automation solution.

A (very rough) diagram of my solution is below - I have deliberately missed out some of the devices as it quickly gets too big to be easily readable but you should get the general idea:



As you can see, I have developed a UPNP compliant interface for comfort along with SmartThings device handlers which understand it. This allows me to take advantage of many of the Comfort features which aren\'t easily represented by standard UPNP devices.

An alternative solution (which I am working on), can replace my comfort UPNP interface with one which follows the simply BinaryDevice UPNP interface, emulating a WeMo switch for each zone, output and alarm set/unset. This removes the need to use SmartThings allowing devices which are WeMo compatible to directly link to the Comfort system. Each Zone, Output and Alarm State will have single binary control and will be represented as separate devices via UPNP.

As shown below this will allow devices such as the Amazon Echo to interface with Comfort directly without requiring SmartThings. It does have its limitations, in so much as it won\'t allow you to take advantage of some advanced features, and may require further customisation if you want to trigger actions, query counters, timers etc but will allow you to query the status of a zone or turn an output on/off.

Both solutions require a Raspberry Pi or other device which can run node, on the RPi I am using (model B2) it only uses around 5% CPU so could quite easily run on something much less powerful should it be required. On a RPi3 as you have, I am confident it won\'t even break a sweat!

Hope this all makes sense, I\'m hoping to have some code for you to test shortly.


Thanks,

Matt

[DavidJ]

HI Matt,I am very interested in HA but come at it from an end user perspective, seems most involved in HA are enthusiasts with who have to attain excellent technical know how.I have had a Comfort system for more that twelve years and its been constantly upgraded and programmed by my maintaining engineer, so a little bit expensive. I must say however on the whole I am really pleased.I do however find creating responses etc, through comfigurator way over my head and therefore saught a more manageable way of controlling basic HA so I opted for Smartthings. I found ST very unreliable and along with many on the ST forum saw many shortcomings, not least constant loss of communication with devices. I have now moved to Vera Plus and have to say there is little in it..... I mainly moved to Vera as it appears one user on here managed to make it work though it required adding the Comfort ZWave UCM.Anyway to my point, I would be really keen of finding a means of communicating with Comfort through either ST or Vera.Your gateway sounds a massive step forward.Any advice assistance would be much appreciated,Regards

David

[mattbrain]

Hi David

I would be delighted if you would give it a go.

I am aware of some of the short-comings with ST; some of which were due to it probably being released before some of it was fully baked, very ambitious goals and a heavy reliance on the cloud. 

It is possible to mitigate against these issues, and some of the stuff coming to the platform now (such as CoRE) are really advanced. I guess if you can separate out the home security / home safety from home automation by leaving the former on the Comfort with the latter on ST you aren\'t losing any of the stability and reliability of Comfort to the essentials whilst getting the benefit of broader integration via ST.

I\'ll need to put some notes together on installation, and if you\'re prepared to try stuff out and help me test it we should all benefit. Do you have access to a Raspberry Pi (any model with Ethernet should work fine) - as this is the current platform I am using for the UPNP interface. Additionally, do you have a UCM with Ethernet?

Thanks,

Matt

[DavidJ]

Hi Matt, I have a Rpi v1 knocking around with Ethernet.  Yes my UCM is an Ethernet version.  Happy to use it through Smartthings which is back in its box. Appreciate your advise. 

[mattbrain]

Hi David

Sounds great - ok, i\'m going to work tomorrow on providing some instructions and tidying up some of the debugging so we can see what is occurring. You will need to get the latest raspbian image from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and set up a clean sdcard as per their instructions.

So long as the RPi is on the same network as the alarm, and you can ssh into it we should be all set.

You will need to get the latest configuration file for your alarm, as the UPNP interface reads that to identify elements to expose, and put it in the same folder as the software.

Can you give me an idea of how big your system is - do you have any SEMs and how many active zones / outputs do you have?

Thanks,

Matt