Complete with http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html software you can essentially cut out the online monitoring and phone lines and simply do everything over the internet. So I don't pay anything for monitoring.
You could actually easily write your own software since the M1 spits out codes in real time and responds to commands that you can send over ssh. Anyway the way I have this setup I can be notified of any event (say even someone walks into and trips a motion sensor) by an email or text message. You could even do a phone call or notify multiple people. And you can remotely turn on and turn off zones, the system, and fully program this to do just about anything.
There isn't anything magical Elk is doing. And I've spoken to their top tech guy and he didn't even know how to troubleshoot an SMTP problem. I would imagine a good kickstarter project could easily duplicate the same hardware functionality.
The security vendor of course pushed the monitoring. I have some experience in that business so I didn't feel that I needed a central station. I just wanted to be notified. You can easily integrate any types of controllers with this (like an X10) and video cameras etc.
Bottom line: There are tons of people with legacy alarm systems. Even just a hardware device that sat on the existing analog POTS line and sent the signals over the Internet to a place that would then send a txt message to a users phone would be a good place to start.
+1 on the Elk M1 Gold. If you're a hacker, you should definitely buy the haker's security system. You can then choose what kind of monitoring you'd like. I go with a local independent security monitoring company that costs about $8 per month. You can also set it up for self-monitoring. I wrote a review of the Elk M1 a while back:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_El...
Great article. I ended up having to buy a laptop PC because you can't run the Elk software for config on a Mac under boot camp etc.
One thing to point out to anyone using a security company to install this. My installer left the system password less and you could telnet into it. In his mind he thought he had secured it. Simply going outside our network and using telnet you could get right in though which is how I checked what he said (he didn't know enough to do that). I'd imagine there are quite a few of these open ports right now out there.
Sensors --> Control Panel --> App|Txt Message
An opportunity for sure. I own two of these Elk Gold Panels:
http://www.elkproducts.com/product-catalog/m1-gold-cross-pla...
Complete with http://www.ekeypad.net/eK_Family/Applications.html software you can essentially cut out the online monitoring and phone lines and simply do everything over the internet. So I don't pay anything for monitoring.
You could actually easily write your own software since the M1 spits out codes in real time and responds to commands that you can send over ssh. Anyway the way I have this setup I can be notified of any event (say even someone walks into and trips a motion sensor) by an email or text message. You could even do a phone call or notify multiple people. And you can remotely turn on and turn off zones, the system, and fully program this to do just about anything.
There isn't anything magical Elk is doing. And I've spoken to their top tech guy and he didn't even know how to troubleshoot an SMTP problem. I would imagine a good kickstarter project could easily duplicate the same hardware functionality.
The security vendor of course pushed the monitoring. I have some experience in that business so I didn't feel that I needed a central station. I just wanted to be notified. You can easily integrate any types of controllers with this (like an X10) and video cameras etc.
Bottom line: There are tons of people with legacy alarm systems. Even just a hardware device that sat on the existing analog POTS line and sent the signals over the Internet to a place that would then send a txt message to a users phone would be a good place to start.