We are about to move into a new house which has an existing alarm system but because of the position of the keypad, (it's so far away from the garage) we would be unlikely to use it.
So given that we need to replace/move the keypad, I have been thinking about what we could do in terms of home automation and linking it up with an updated alarm system.
As I've been investigating options I find myself being more and more confused because there is no single system to resolve all these requirements (unless you spend megabucks). I am a software developer so I can manage to use C# to customise some things, but I don't have a lot of time to be working on such things.
I've talked to ili one touch in constellation drive, but unfortunately their system is well outside of our potential budget, even though it would do everything what we want.
We only have ADSL broadband, sadly :-(
What I would like are these things, in priority order:
- an alarm. We can reuse our existing PIRs and hopefully sirens, the alarm should be able to communicate via email or SMS that an event has been triggered.
- 2x keyfob, from which we can close and open the garage doors (there are two garage doors), and turn the alarm on and off
- Turn the alarm on and off, and monitor the alarm from our phones (1 Windows phone, 1 android)
- ability to communicate with anyone at the door by a some sort of Internet doorbell (ring doorbell seems most likely at the moment)
- couple of cameras inside the house to be able to monitor things
- open and close curtains at particular times of the day, automatically when the alarm is on, but sometimes may be triggered manually from our phone
- turn lights on and off at particular times of the day, automatically when the alarm is on, but sometimes may be triggered manually from our phone
- unlock the front door via our phones
- smoke alarms and heat sensors linked in to the system
- Turn on and off an irrigation system, probably with three or four different points that need to be turned on and off. This could either be triggered manually through our phones or automatically via some sort of soil moisture test
- allow us to turn on the heat pump before we get home
I would prefer everything to be wired, not particularly keen on adding additional potential security risks with additional wireless technology, but open to ideas.
So I'm trying to figure out what the best options are for integrating things together. I am aware that there are not many things that run on Windows phone at this point. If it was reasonably simple I could program something myself, or I might have to bite the bullet and get an android phone which would make me extremely sad as I haven't yet found an android phone that has the same functionality as my Lumia 1520.
Does anyone have any recommendations on what might meet our needs?
Thanks,
Stefan
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