This illustrate how to setup a medium alarm. An alarm system is consisting of a few standard component. The purpose of an alarm system is simply to detect change of state of sensor and to send message information to the owner. It can additionally send image from network camera in order to clarify the situation. It has the ability to switch on/off light and sirens. A self made alarm do not require deep knowledge in programmation or electronic. Here is a quick review of the mandatory component of an alarm system:
A wire alarm is a wise choice for high reliabily and low cost reason. In order to connect the loop circuit from your sensor you will need an IO board. The development made on this page has been made with the control board ETH-IO32B. It has a lot of nice features and one of them is that it is pluggable on the ethernet port of the local network.
Android is the cheapest hardware which can send GSM text message and connect to the internet through wifi. Whithout extra cost it provides a colour screen and a backup battery. The system will work with old Gingerbread android up to the newest PIE version. It will works without SIM card if you don't need the SMS functionallity.
An application will bind the Android smartphone and the board together. AlarmM application is supported the ETH-IO32B board. Each Input or Ouptput of the board can be graphically associated to action such as email, text message, phone call and more.
Camera is "nice to have" in an alarm system. The alarmM aplication is supporting all the camera on the markets which have the label "ONVIF". It means that it will find and configure automatically the camera on your network. The AlarmM has as well a native support of the camera of the smartephone itself which can be used in the alarm system. A demo using the camera of the smartephone can be found here