Heimdall - Let Homey watch over your home

I have setup Heimdall according to the instructions without any delays, but I do not get the alarm triggered. When the status is ‘armed’ and a sensor detects motion it does not trigger the alarm. In the log I read: “Hal upstairs: Motion detected, no alarm trigger due to running countdown”. Anything I might be missing? Thanks for the reply.

Hello Mike,

Can you please post a screenshot of the Devices - Settings page and of the DELAYS part of the Settings page?

Thanks for your quick reply Danee. Please find the requested screenshots below:


You’re welcome.
From your screenshots I see nothing that’s not Ok, and I’ve also looked through the Diagnostics Report you sent but can’t find anything their either.
So, it’s hard to determine what’s going on, but let’s try to fix it.

Can you please set an Alarm Delay of 30 seconds and select Delay on the Hal Upstairs sensor?
Next, make sure Hal Upstairs is not detecting motion and set the Surveillance Mode to either Armed or Partially Armed. Next, Do a little dance in front of the sensor, wait a couple of seconds and set the Surveillance Mode to Disarmed.
Please go into Heimdalls settings and send a new Diagnostics Report.
To disable the Alarm Delay you just have to remove Delay from Hal Upstairs, there is no need to set the Alarm Delay value to 0.
You can then do the test sequence again, see what happens and send me a new Diagnostics Report.

Can you please add the time you started the tests in the remarks in the Diagnostics Report, that will make it a lot easier for me to find the part of the report that is relevant.

@Mike_de_Mots Thanks for the logs, I’ve looked at them and see it isn’t resolved yet. Somehow the variable alarmCounterRunning is set and doesn’t get unset.
There’s some things to try.
First, remove any Delay from your devices, next (I’m not sure if it helps but better safe than sorry) make sure the Arming Delay and Alarm Delay are not 0)

Things to try, any of these steps should reset the variable:

  • Enable the Allow Alarm while in Alarm Delay and do the test again.
  • Stop and Start the Heimdall app, this should initialise the variable and set it to false.

If that doesn’t help a reboot of your Homey should also reset the variable.

Please let me know if this solves this for you.

I was reading through this whole post and noticed this unwanted low battery behaviour of the neo coolcam devices. I fully agree that you want/need sensors that handle low battery situations gracefully. False alarms are to be avoided.

Is this still happening (low battery causing false alarms) with neo coolcam sensors?

Interestingly @DaneedeKruyff is working on support for Ring devices (motion and contact sensors) (see this post) that seem to be very reasonably priced considering they are official zwave devices. One would expect that ring/amazon should be capable of implementing the specs correctly on their sensors.

cheers
Onno

This is something I don’t experience with my Neo Coolcam PIRs v2 and v3. I did had the battery problem with Fibaro PIR, Maybe a version difference, but for me the CoolCam PIR’s work very well.

I would like to reduce number of possible false alarms (i.e. triggered by motion sensor due to sun reflections or mosquito…)

Is it possible to require that at least two sensors (preferably within a security/perimeter group, i.e. kitchen, leaving room) need to get trigger within x seconds before the alarm siren is triggered and push notifications is being sent?

An example, in the leaving room I have to motion sensors, very unlikely that both will create a false motion trigger at the same time or within 60seconds, but very likely that they will create a real motion trigger when someone is walking in the room within 60seconds.

Hi Welcome on the forum and thanks for using Heimdall

Heimdall will always activate the Alarm State when a selected sensor is tripped in an active Surveillance Mode, no way around that.
That said, you could choose to not use the The alarm is activated card but the Sensor tripped in Alarmstate card to trigger the flow to take action on an Alarm. You’ll end up having to deal with some other stuff, like should you disable Heimdalls Alarm State when your false positive is no longer active? Do you only want this for this particular sensor that gives the false positives? Etc. Etc.
So, I think you’re better of fixing your problem at the root cause, a sensor giving false positives. Either repositioning/re-adjusting the sensor, not using it in Heimdall, dynamically removing it from a Surveillance Mode with the Add/Remove sensor from Surveillance Mode action cards on sunny days.
And I realize it will take a (lot) of time to read this whole thread but I’m sure you’ll find it usefull as a lot of tips and tricks can be found on how to fit Heimdall to your needs.

False positives can be a pain to eliminate completely.
So, I got this idea:
Create a virtual motion sensor, which is set to motion alarm=true, if f.i. both the hallway and livingroom sensors motion alarm=true.
Replace the hallway and livingroom sensors with the new virtual sensor in Heimdall.

I assume your sensors hold the motion alarm state for 1 minute.
This can be done using the ‘a zone becomes active’ trigger, and then the order in which the sensors went into motion alarm is important, and configurable; The first active sensor is in the AND part with the ‘a zone is active’ card, the second active sensor is the trigger.

Otherwise it can be done using ‘an alarm became active, and the sensor is
Motion’ trigger, with both zones as a condition.
Now the order of the sensors going into motion alarm state, is irrelevant.

I would strongly advice to not overcomplicate your setup, just to get around a sensor giving false positives.
Ask yourself what you want to happen on a overcast day or during nighttime. Do you need that sensor to trigger an alarm by itself? Yes → fix the false positives. No → You don’t need that sensor anyway so don’t configure it in Heimdall
Don’t try to mitigate a symptom, fix the problem.

Thanks for both of yours inputs, I will look over What sensor I do need to triggar the alarm and not, and first start loggning if I do get any false triggats.

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ring Security - Extend Heimdall with Ring Security products

Is there a possibility to select “Night” to activate Heimdall ands make settings for the option “Night”? This option is available in Homekit but not in Homey. In homey you have 3 options: Armed, Disarmed & Partially armed.
The same button in Homekit: Home, Away, Night, Off

I like to make a difference between Partially Armed and Night.

Hi Rob, that’s not possible, like you say Homey only offers the Disarmed, Partially Armed and Armed modes and Heimdall uses that. So to get an extra mode you would have to submit a feature request at Athom.

That said, Heimdall does offer flowcards to dynamically add/remove sensors from Surveillance Modes maybe you can do something with those cards under certain conditions to get the desired behaviour.

Hi Danee,

Thanks for the answer. I was not aware the functionality of the Heimdall button which is visible in Homekit is managed by Athom. I thought it was part of the Heimdall app.

I know that I can flow cards to solve my request. But when I saw the button: Night/Nacht in Homekit I was curious where I find the settings for this in the app or flow cards. But it’s clear, there aren’t any. :sweat_smile:

Hi Rob,

It’s not really the Heimdall Surveilance Mode Switch that’s visible in Homekit, it’s a separate device created by Apple to handle the modes and they decided on 4 different modes.
Athom is responsible for the 3 modes in Homey, I use these modes in Heimdall and a developer on the Homeykit App mapped the modes from Homey to the (4) Modes of Apple Homekit. When that part of the Homeykit App was written we discussed how to map the 3 modes from Homey to the 4 modes in Homekit and the outcome is how it is now.
I’ve never used Homeys built-in (experimental) Homekit integration so I have no idea how that is handled.

Hi Danee,

I do not make use of the builtin Homekit for Homey but I make use of Homeykit app.
But it is clear to me. Thanks for your answer. :relaxed:

Hi Danee,

I’m working with the Ring keypad and created a flow with notification who has entered the pin and what is done. But I miss the variable user name. I only can notify which pincode was entered. Is it possible to extend this with a variable username?

Hi Rob,

Can you please show your flow?

The Ring Security app isn’t aware of users as user management is done in Heimdall so when using a trigger card from that app there is no username available only the PIN entered.
When using a trigger card from Heimdall the reason it isn’t possible (yet?) is described in the Ring Security App post here.