Cell phone notification of alarm

[lugnut]

I got most of my installation done, so I thought I'd try a cell phone notification of alarm.

Here's what I did (but it didn't call my cell phone)

In RP, under "telephones" I set up Telephone 1 as type 0, entered my cell phone number, set reporting format to "5=voice message" and dialing attempts to 2.

Then under "automation-Rules" I wrote a rule: (I realize this is a silly rule; just doing some testing)
WHENEVER AREA1 IS ARMED STAY
AND ANY ALARM, ANY AREA IS ACTIVE
THEN DIAL (my cell #) and ANNOUNCE Alarm(vm302)


After that, under "Automation-Voice-Zone Conditions-Alarm(vm302) I set the message to be "Alert [500ms silence] Alarm Activated Alarm Activated"

Then I saved everything, disconnected RP from the control, armed the system in stay, waited til the delay expired, and then opened an exterior door. The alarm went off, sirens and voice thru the interior speaker, but no phone call.

What have I missed? My landline phone is connected to the M1G and no trouble is indicated so I think the hookup is correct.

 

[Spanky]

Rewrite your Rule:

Whenever any alarm in any area becomes active
Then dial your phone

Your Rule would never fire because you must be arming to stay and an alarm must be active at the same time which will never occur.

Remember the Whenever is the triggering event of the Rule. The AND statements are static conditions that must be True when the Whenever part of the Rule fires.

 

[gatchel]

Spanky,

As an aside, are there any future developments in the alarm and email reporting coming from Elk? Like having an alarm variable report (Zone Name) in email or announced over the phone.

Just curious. I won't hold you to it, I promise.

 

[lugnut]

I see your point; thanks.

I re-wrote it but still nothing. I went to the panel during the alarm and the neither the telco siezed nor the dialer active LEDs lit up (I'm assuming they should), so I must have a setting or two that aren't right somewhere.

The settings that look like they might be relevant, I have set like this:

Communicator-Area RCs- Dialer delay=0 ("Use dialer delay" is not checked for any of enabled my zones)
Global 33 CS verify call time =30 seconds

Do these matter for this? Any others I should check?

 

[lugnut]

Is there some way I can route the telephone line activity (audio) to output1 speaker when the line is siezed and dialing, for debugging purposes?

I can't quite figure out what's going on w/ calling my cell phone.

 

[me2]

It looks like it should work to me. How about writing a rule like:
Whenever keypad x f4 key is presses
then dial (your cell phone)

That way you dont need to keep hearing the siren.

The leds should light. Are you sure you have the phone lines right? There is a diagnostic that will tell you what the M1 sees voltage wize on the phone line. Maybe that will give you a clue.

 

[me2]

If you disconnect the phone line, do you get a Phone Fault?

 

[lugnut]

I changed the rule along the line you suggested so the siren doesn't go off (changed it so opening a door causes a call to my cell phone) and that sort of works, except not consistently.

I have call-ID block on my landline so my dial string for calling my cell includes *82,
which unblocks the number for that call. That way I can be pretty sure the ELK is calling, even if I don't get a voice announcement.

I originally had a D as the first character in the dial string (to detect dial tone before dialing, since that seemed like a good thing to do) but that didn't work for some reason, so I added a comma (2 sec pause) as the first character,
giving: ,*82,[my cell #].

Sometimes that works, and shows my landline phone number on my cell phone display, but sometimes it doesn't and just displays "private number." The voice announcement I hear also varies. Sometime I just get silence, and even when I hear the voice announcement it always seems to be in the middle of the voice announcement, rather than starting from the beginning when I answer. It repeats the announcement until you hit the # key so I can still hear the whole thing but I'm not sure why the voice announcement is started before I answer my cell phone.

I'll mess with it a bit more but I'm running out of things to try.

Still can't seem to get the rule that calls my cell on any alarm to work for some reason.

 

[lugnut]

Is there some way I can route the telephone line activity (audio) to output1 speaker when the line is siezed and dialing, for debugging purposes?

I can't quite figure out what's going on w/ calling my cell phone.

I went and bought a cheapo $8 phone and attached it at the RJ31 so I could listen in once the M1G siezed the line and was and dialing. The voice announcement starts before the cell phone picks up, and continues repeating the message in a loop. On the first dialing, the call-ID unblock (the *82) works and my cell phone shows the phone number, but if I don't pick up the cell and let it retry, the second time it only dials enough digits (DTMF tones) for the phone number, not the *82, and not the pauses that I have in the dial string. Not sure why.

So on the 2nd try it does not display the phone number it shows up as "private number." The voice announcement still runs before I answer the cell phone (not sure why that is the case either; maybe that is how it operates(?)), and continues in a loop after I answer, until I hit the # key. At that point the M1G releases the line and both the siezed and dialing LED's turn off.

I also tried just removing the ,*82,
from the dialing string, and the voice announcement still starts before the cell phone is answered, and repeats in a loop.

 

[mustangcoupe]

maybe add a few commas after it dials.... this way it might pause before it starts speaking

 

[lugnut]

maybe add a few commas after it dials.... this way it might pause before it starts speaking

The trouble is, the voice announcement would still not be triggered by the cell phone answering event, so it may or may not end up in sync. It wouldn't be possible to choose the correct number of commas so it ends up in sync every time. It has to be triggered by the answering event (since that is asynchronous) for that to happen.

I guess my question amounts to whether this is as expected, that the voice announcement just plays in a loop and is not triggered by the cell phone answering event, or whether I still have something not set quite right because the voice announcement should by design hold off til the answering event.

Also, I'm not sure what would happen if the phone being dialed went to voice mail, and the voice mail allowed many minutes of record time before terminating. The behavior of the voice announcement/dialer isn't documented anywhere that I can find, so I'm trying to find out what is expected, and what I might still need to work on.

A related question to this is how the re-dialer is triggered: does it keep redialing regardless of whether the phone on the other end picks up (i.e. it doesn't detect that event, and just assumes it probably went to a voice mail), and continues in this mode until either: the redial limit is reached, or, the phone on the other end presses a # key which serves as the "terminate process" event to the M1G(?)

Another question is whether the pre-dial (,*82,) string is being handled as expected. Namely, that it executes the string on the first dial attempt, but after that, it ignores the pre-dial string and just dials the phone number part.

I haven't tried reporting to multiple phone numbers yet, so I don't know how all these characteristics change for additional numbers that the voice announcement is sent to.

A flow chart of the voice dialer behavior would be useful...is there one somewhere, and I'm just not finding it?