This repository exists for archive purposes. Please see kapALARM instead.

About

This is a work-in-progress project. The goal is to become a complete Home Alarm System, comparable to the expensive multi zone commercial systems, easy to setup and use and completely open source from top to bottom, so everyone can install it, study it, change it and do anything one might want to do with it.

You can watch a CylonAlarm development Youtube video:

Current Status (v0.2.8)

With this version we have a working alarm system for our home/lab/garage/etc (one or more at the same time). It can detect an intrusion with motion detectors and door switches, and will turn on one or more sirens. It is enabled and disabled by the residents using nfc tags (to one or more installed nfc readers) which everyone can have in their keychains. It can also send a notification-email to pre-configured email addresses using a gmail account. In addition it can use GPIOs to trigger custom made actions.

Warning!

In this stage the system is for people who really know what they are doing. Experience in electronics and software is required.

Hardware ingredients

We will need:

• a Rapberry Pi
• a NFC PN532 Breakout board
• one or more NFC Tags
• one or more IR detectors and/or magnetic NC switches
• a siren

for the control unit:

• 1x LED
• 1x buzzer
• 1x LM7805
• 1x 1kΩ resistor

for cabling:

• a long (UTP cable (10 meters or more.. depending on the house)
• a utp patch cable (straight) about 1-2 meters
• RJ-45 plug

and for our CylonAlarm Board v0.2:

• 1x 5V relay
• 1x npn transistor
• 1x diode
• 1x RJ-45 connector
• 1x DC connector
• 2x 1.5kΩ resistors

Circuit

Follow the instructions on the images below to prepare the electronics.

Software Installation

First of all we log in to Raspberry Pi (running Raspbian OS) through ssh:

ssh pi@raspberrypi.lan

In this version we need the nfc-eventd which will provide our program the information of the nfc tags that are being used. So we need to download and compile it from source following these instructions

We have to install some dependencies, and a virtual screen (tmux):

sudo apt-get install python-dbus
sudo apt-get install python-gobject
sudo apt-get install tmux

Now we can download CylonAlarm:

git clone https://github.com/kapcom01/CylonAlarm.git
cd CylonAlarm
git checkout v0.2.8

We MUST make the following changes:

• Copy cylonalarm/config.json.sample to cylonalarm/config.json and then EDIT it.
• Add event tag_insert action of /etc/nfc-eventd.conf to: action = "python /home/pi/CylonAlarm/check_tag.py $TAG_UID 0";

Running

Finally we can run the program in the following way:

sudo dbus-launch tmux
ctrl+b ["]
nfc-eventd
ctrl+b [up key]
python cylonalarm.py

This way we can have nfc-eventd and cylonalarm.py running on the same virtual screen so they can communicate through dbus.

leave it run

Now we can leave the program run and log out raspberry pi by detatching first the virtual screen:

ctrl+b [d]

and then log out:

ctrl+d

get back to it

To get back to the virtual screen, we ssh again, and then attach:

ssh pi@raspberrypi.lan
sudo tmux attach

and we should now see the screen where we left it.