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“A simple touchscreen interface, powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero, which controls the alarm in Home Assistant over MQTT. This project is a DIY touchscreen panel to arm/disarm Home Assistant’s alarm system. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi, 3.5” touchscreen display, a custom Python-based application, and MQTT. This guide walks you through the creation of the project and provides everything you need to create your own! Home Assistant is an amazing open-source home automation platform. Among its many features is the ability to implement your own home security alarm system. You can then use various sensors to determine if/when to trigger an alarm. In my case, I have several Z-Wave door sensors on all of my exterior doors. If any door opens while the alarm is active, I receive instant push notifications on my phone and computers. Eventually I’ll be expanding this to include motion sensors and a siren. While this works fine, the only way to arm/disarm the device is through the web interface. The manual alarm unfortunately doesn’t have a single API interface we can use to send arm/disarm commands while also receiving instant state changes from HA. I therefore created the new Manual MQTT Alarm component which functions identically to the manual alarm, but also allows two-way communication over MQTT! With this component we can easily build our own remote keypad using any web-connected platform we can imagine. In my case, I chose to build a solution using a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen.”

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