Building a home security system with Homey

Questions & Help
1

My first post.
Hello world!

Thank you for your patience and understanding :slight_smile:

I’m planning to build a home security system using Homey, replacing my proprietary Verisure setup.
I’ll share my plans with you guys shortly, but first a few questions. And yes, I have browsed the forum looking for answers before I posted this.

Homey as the only hub
I plan to use various sensors and cameras. I see that Heimdall does not support all Xiaomi devices I’d like to use, or the support seems to be spotty, judging from the various reports on the forum.

Q1
Anyone out here running Xiaomi devices smoothly with Homey as the only hub? If so, what motion and glass breakage sensors do you use?

Q2
I have read that there are issues with the Xiaomi Hubs, EU vs Chinese versions in order to connect and enable dev mode on the EU versions. Assuming I need a hub or would like to use one, can someone confirm or deny that latest EU / Chinese versions are usable (I live in Norway).

Q3
I have the whole house and outside covered with Ring devices today. I’m sick and tired of the lack of access to configure. The lack of smarter motion sensing and facial recognition. Planning to exchange my door bell as well as indoor and outside cameras. Any recommendations?

Door bell - need motion detection and facial recognition
Indoor - motion detection, night mode, usb + battery
Outdoor - motion detection, night mode, wide angle, usb

I already have Heimdall set up in test mode and I’m triggering my own small fake alarms (push messages) for various conditions. Seems promising. But now I need to make my hardware selections.

Thanks in advanced :hugs:

2

My glass breakage sensors.

3

No/very few problems here with my aqara sensors used for alarm, directly connected to homey. I have to admit that most of the sensors are running past a router (in my case Philips hue white bulbs) and I have almost never unresponsive sensors. there is also a zigbee rewrite in the pipeline which apparently will see the light pretty “soon”. This should also make the zigbee connection run more smooth as quite a lot of people are experiencing problems right now. Only thing you need to take care of is what you expect during a power outage. Do you have a UPS that keeps your internet and homey/zigbee routers alive? If not, do you want this?

4

Thanks @Hannes85, I dont have an UPS, but we have “never” experiences outages and my power supply is viia the ground so there is no effective way to cut it off. So that means the alarm would “break” in the unlikely event of a power outage by “natural” causes. I don’t see that scaling for a criminal to speculate in, so I’ll accept that risk. I’m assuming our setup will get back up and running when the power gets back up, and it will have to deal with that scenario when I have the full rig ready for test.

I could is an FTTT ping to notify me of the system being down, so that I know how to react when it gets back up. Don’t really know how the alarm (Heimdall) will respond when stuff come back up.