I'm hoping to integrate control of my Ademco Vista 128 BP alarm panel into my Indigo system. So far I'd be happy with just one way control.

As such, I am interested in your AD2USB board. I can send serial strings without problems using a Keyspan USB Serial adapter. This is about the extent of my programming abilities.

While hopefully a user friendly two-way solution may be developed by you all or someone else (Berkinet?), given my limitations, is the AD2USB currently useable with the Mac simply by hooking it up to the Ademco, setting a keypad code and then sending serial strings from Indigo?

hamw wrote:
I'm hoping to integrate control of my Ademco Vista 128 BP alarm panel into my Indigo system. So far I'd be happy with just one way control.

As such, I am interested in your AD2USB board. I can send serial strings without problems using a Keyspan USB Serial adapter. This is about the extent of my programming abilities.

While hopefully a user friendly two-way solution may be developed by you all or someone else (Berkinet?), given my limitations, is the AD2USB currently useable with the Mac simply by hooking it up to the Ademco, setting a keypad code and then sending serial strings from Indigo?

Yes it is just that easy. to arm for example I would open the port send in your user code + 2 and your panel will arm.

I will let Berkinet chime in but AFAIK he has available code to integrate into Indigo available to those who ask.

Re
Sean M

hamw wrote:
...given my limitations, is the AD2USB currently useable with the Mac simply by hooking it up to the Ademco, setting a keypad code and then sending serial strings from Indigo?
There are two questions (both of which would apply to any OS) you need to answer. How will the ad2usb be connected to the computer, and what programming environment will be used to communicate with the ad2usb?

There are 2 possible ways to connect the ad2usb to a computer: USB or IP. The issue for the Mac, running Indigo is that Indigo itself has no capability of communicating with external devices other than Insteon and X10. So, if you want to talk to the ad2usb from Indigo you will need to extend its capabilities by writing something in AppleScript. What you write will depend on how the ad2usb is connected to the Mac. But, the easiest way to send commands to the alarm panel would be to use a one-line AppleScript to call a one-line shell script and send the commands via telnet. This is not perfect, since there is no good to pace the sending of the keypresses (at less than 1 sec intervals), but it works.

Before you can proceed you need to decide exactly what your requirements are: what do you want to be able to do? A key issue is whether or not you want Indigo to receive messages from the ad2usb. If the answer is no, then the best solution is probably to install the Mono GUI and then use it to share the ad2usb via IP.

This is not hard to do, but it is not as simple as just plugging in the ad2usb and clicking some check-boxes in Indigo either. maybe when Indigo 5.0 comes out with plugin support that can be done, but not yet.

I have mono 2.6.1 on MacOS 10.6.3 and the patch did not work.
Hey berkinet, did you ever get SerialPort working on OSX? If not, any chance you can provide feedback at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=384227?

maybe when Indigo 5.0 comes out with plugin support that can be done, but not yet.
Ouch, that sucks. I'm looking forward to when modules are implemented in Mono GUI.

guinness wrote:
...did you ever get SerialPort working on OSX? If not, any chance you can provide feedback at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=384227?... ...Ouch, that sucks. I'm looking forward to when modules are implemented in Mono GUI.
No, I just reinstalled the older version. All I run in Mono is the ad2usb GUI so I wasn't that interested in having Mono be up-to-date. I didn't report the problem because there were already other similar reports (and I was lazy). Mostly, it just plan wouldn't load, lots of "stuff not found" errors. It wasn't a subtle issue

Indigo plug-ins: From what they are saying, the plug-ins will need to be in Python. But, given the flexibility of Python, I guess you could just use Python to glue to a Mono app. However, I think one of the major goals of the plug-ins is to be able to expand the support for the types of devices Indigo can directly manage (I.e. not just Insteon & X10). So, maybe I could define an alarm panel as an Indigo device with three-states: Off, Stay and Away. Then I could say, if switch foo turns off, arm the system. You can already do that today (I have) but it takes a lot of coding, and the Indigo UI isn't really used.

Berkinet,
per your post, can I still assume that I will be able to plug in the USB cable to the mac, find it with serial bridge and write some simple scripts to send commands to the unit?