If I were to install window motion sensors, glass break sensors, door sensors, and cameras, I’ve basically got my own home security system. But how would you go about mimicking the remote monitoring functions that a company such as ADT or SimpliSafe would do?
The type where if your alarm goes off, you get a phone call and are asked for your code word, and if you give the incorrect code word, the police are summoned or whatever.
No, I mean if someone breaks into my house, I want the police to be called.
Maybe first check if it’s even legal to robo-call the police emergency line. I suppose with off-the-shelf systems that’s done by people in some callcenter who read the notification. In this case that’d be you. Or they’re somehow certified or have some agreement with the police… I don’t know the details. Technically it’d be possible. I’m running an Asterisk PBX server and hook into the dialplan with the REST API (that’d be ARI on the Asterisk side). That way Home Assistant can call me and make my landline phone ring twice once the laundry is done. And Asterisk can do arbitrary things. You could make it call you, play back some announcement, wait for your answer and process it and then call the police line and play back some pre-recorded message.
But you’d really need to talk to police and ask them about how to interface with them.
First of all, those monitoring companies (at least where I live), send their own person, not the police. Maybe they call the police if they see that a break in is happening but first they check it out themselves first.
So really you’d have to send yourself a notification (on iOS they have the emergency ones that always go through and loudly ring on your phone). Then you’d have to check it out yourself.
Calling the police automatically every time sounds like a bad idea and I don’t have trust they’d come in a timely manner if at all. At least with my system it would have been like 50 false alarms and no real alarms to the police over the last 15 years.
Our system goes off and then after like 60 seconds, the alarm company calls you and asks you for your safe word. And if you give it incorrectly, they send the police.
If you are able to give your safe word to a person over the phone, which would mean that you have your phone, why do you need something else besides you to call the police?
All you need is a notification that something has been tripped.
Maybe because you’re being robbed?
If you don’t answer the phone call, then they send the police as well.
I think you’d be better with an automatic text to 911 rather than an automatic call.
That can be automated as well without an incoming call being involved, automate a notification, if not addressed in x amount of time, call or text police I suppose, but at that point if you’re face to face with your attacker without defense, you’ve already lost the game
Maybe this is a protection for a situation when you are at your home under the gun point, but they still let you answer the phone and order you to “act normally”. Sounds like something from a movie, but maybe this happens in real life too.
If it’s gotten that far, I don’t think automating a safe word will do you any good. You can text the police in a lot of places
What if you give it correctly but you aren’t at home? We have had a lot of false alarms from failing sensors or curtains blowing in the wind, etc.
Also I don’t trust that the police would respond to such an alarm in a timely manner.