OmniLinkBridge to integrate Home Assistant, SmartThings, Node-RED

[sic0048]

I literally just had to "struggle" through getting MQTT working with Home Assistant last night.

I've been running CQC forever and finally am making the transition over to using Home Assitant. I am actually excited about the move, but having to relearn everything has been harder than I expected. It's not that getting MQTT set up in HA is hard, but it still takes a lot of reading the documents, and then some trial and error when actually trying it out.

That being said, my Tasmota devices have now populated themselves in HA over MQTT automatically, so I am pleased with my progress. I also had to troubleshoot some Elk M1XEP issues (that ended up requiring a new unit to be swapped over), so I have also just got the Elk working too. Now I can actually start recreating all of the lighting automation I had set up in CQC around time of day and/or Elk armed status. I feel like I am finally making progress on my transition.

 

[charliebarns]

Sounds like some good progress! I have another mqtt server up and running but I can't remember how to load it with the config and have my HA on a different device connect to it. Ahh Sage Tv! I see you were a user also. I was heavily invested in Sage with 6 HD Tuners recording many shows onto a 10Tb stack. What a fantastic program. It's a shame they sold out.

 

[pete_c]

Here initially ran MQTT autonomously on the Ubuntu server. I did have some issues with HA using MQTT. I switched the configuration of MQTT server to HA and all was well afterwards.

Lately been grouping Tasmota switches for multiple lamps in rooms. Works well.

 

[Bitjockey]

Hi there, I'm a longtime HAI Omni user, recently migrated from HomeSeer to Home Assistant, still going up the HA learning curve, even so it's much easier than when I tried some 5 years ago.

I used OmniLinkBridge and MQTT and can see all of my Omni devices. Also using Hubitat Elevation and using HA to connect HE Zigbee buttons/sensors to automate Omni has been great.

There are still several struggles that I've had no luck with, the main one being that when I use HA to arm my Omni, the Omni does actually arm but the status shown in HA is still "disarmed". From the physical keypad the HA status does get updated but not when I arm from HA.

Looking at the MQTT log I see:
[OmniLinkBridge.MQTT.MessageProcessor DBG] Received: Type: area, Id: 1, Command: command, Value: ARM_HOME,validate,xxxx
[OmniLinkBridge.MQTT.MessageProcessor DBG] SetArea: 1, Validated security code, Code Number: 1, Authority: Master
[OmniLinkBridge.MQTT.MessageProcessor DBG] SetArea: 1 to home, Code Number: 1
[OmniLinkBridge.Modules.OmniLinkII VRB] Sending: SecurityDay, Par1: 1, Par2: 1

I've read all 50 pages of posts here and couldn't find a solution; has anyone else encountered this, or have any ideas?

I'm using the latest OLB (1.1.19.2). Not sure if I should use "The MQTT Alarm control panel integration" or is that already provided elsewhere? I did add some example code to my configuration.yaml file but nothing I did ever made a difference.

 

[ano]

So I am doing what you are doing as well. I also had HomeSeer and Hubitat. Anyway, on your problem on getting the Omni status. I'm not exactly sure what you are doing, but I would recommend this. Create a flag on the Omni that gets updated on the status you are looking for. For example, I have flags for alarm on, alarm off, alarm night, alarm day, alarm vacation, and any others. then just use the bridge to read these flags. You can use this for the other direction also, if you need it, but you may not.

The Omni is old, to say the least, so if you can offload tasks, that helps. The Omni will set its flags first. This is especially important if the alarm goes off and you are trying to read why. Alarms take ALL priority, over everything else!! So you may never get an alarm indication until its turned off.

For Zigbee I use Zigbee thermostats and a few Zigbee outlets to indicate the alarm is in away mode, but most Zigbee devices are connected to Home Assistant directly. Its been very reliable. I run HA on a Pi 5 with SSD drive (Don't run off an SD card). It works great.

 

[Bitjockey]

Thanks for your suggestions ano; I created 3 mutually exclusive flags (fl_armed_away, fl_armed_day, fl_disarmed) on my Omni, as well as automations that watch for these to trigger and then arm/disarm the keypad in HA accordingly.

I then armed my Omni from the physical keypad, saw the state reflected in HA, all as before. But when I disarm from the physical keypad, even so the Omni itself shows DISARMED, HA still thinks my system is Armed_Home. The only way I can get the disarmed state is by going to Developer options, state, and manually changing state from armed_home to disarmed. Very strange. Here's my automation for disarming:


With this automation enabled, it looks like HA is trying to arm my Omni repeatedly:

I had no other automation enabled when I observed this.

I noticed one of the last changes to OmniLinkBridge was to "Fix MQTT alarm control panel for Home Assistant 2024.6". Maybe something got broken since then? Anyone else with this problem?

 

[ano]

But when I disarm from the physical keypad, even so the Omni itself shows DISARMED, HA still thinks my system is Armed_Home.

OK we are missing a few steps here. Panel is disarmed. Are you using PC Access to see that your HAI flags are setting correctly? So it looks like is fl_disarmed being set to 1? If not, your Omni code is not correct. Next, you should see the MQTT setting going to 1 for that flag. So you know the OmniLinkBridge is working. Finally you have you Home Assistant code or actions doing something in response. So which of these 3 things is not working?

 

[Bitjockey]

Thanks again ano. Last night I armed my Omni to DAY (armed_home) from the physical keypad before bedtime. My Omni has an automation that automatically disarms itself at 6:00am the next morning. Here's what I see around the arming and disarming events:




As you can see, something is changing the Hall keypad to armed_home right after my system does it's daily 6:00am disarming.
I have no automations enabled that would do so. And the Omni never receives any arm_home notification from HA at 6:00am, it remains disarmed.

My OmniLinkBridge mqtt_discovery_override_area is configured as follows:
id=1;code_disarm=true;code_arm=true;arm_vacation=false;arm_night=false

I'm perplexed!