Integrating GuardLine with Samsung SmartThings for a smart Driveway alarm

Components:

Samsung SmartThings 2nd Gen Hub £100

GuardLine GL2000 £100

Small amount of bell wire £1

Fibaro 1st Generation Door Sensor FGK-10* £32

Why did I do this?

To detect motion on the front of my property, i’ve depended upon the Motion Alerts from a combination my Ring video doorbell (Gen 1) and my Xiaomi Yi 1080p Outdoor cameras.

Motion detection from a camera is not good enough for my situation.  I was getting too many motion alerts which were squirrels, bushes moving in the wind and other things I don’t want.  

How does it work?

The main contenders for Passive Infrared (PIR) detection for my driveway were the Dakota Alert 2500 and the GuardLine GL2000. I went for the Guardline based on the reviews, and the fact I could buy it from my favourite retailer with next day delivery in the UK (Amazon).

The Guardline was installed in 5 minutes, it’s a really impressive piece of kit and is simple to plug and play.  The range between the motion sensor (outdoor) and the base station/alarm (indoor) is 500ft. 

I wanted the driveway alerts in my SmartThings, so I bought the Fibaro 1st Generation Door Sensor due to it’s “Dry contact” (AKA Zero Potential or Zero Voltage) connections. This means I can make the GuardLine output a signal to my Samsung SmartThings hub via Zwave. Making a non-smart device "smart", without any soldering.

 

I connected the “NC” (Normally Closed) of the Guardline to the “In” on the Fibaro, and the “Com” from the Guardline to the “GND” of the Fibaro.

The Fibaro Door Sensor is natively supported in Smartthings, so when it is paired with Smartthings (by pressing the tamper button 3 times) it should appear as a Z wave Door Sensor.

I then logged into the Smartthings API and changed the type of device from “Z Wave Door/Window Sensor” to “Z Wave Motion Sensor”, and that was it! I have a smart driveway alarm for which I can set automations for less than £140 which should give far more accuracy to driveway motion alerts than my Ring or my Yi cameras.

Downsides of the particular GuardLine product:

1. Should I add more motion sensors to the Guardline, my SmartThings will only receive one generic alert of motion, it won't differentiate between the specific parts of the property for which motion was detected.  I believe the Dakota Alert can do this but i'm not 100% certain.  
2. Fibaro have discontinued the Gen 1 Door Sensor with dry contacts, so it wasn't easy to source it.  I hear there are other door sensors with Dry Contacts but didn't try any.

I DID try the Fibaro Universal Binary Sensor, but after multiple attempts I could not get input into it from the GuardLine's outputs.

Xbox One Game Streaming issue with Netgear Switch

I thought I'd write a post about some problems i've had with game streaming from my Xbox One S in the hope it may help someone.

My network infrastructure is crudely documented in this diagram.

The equipment list is as follows:

• Xbox One S 500GB
• 2 x Sumvision 1000Mbps Powerline adapters
• 2 x Netgear GS108 Gigabit switches
• HP Laptop with gigabit NIC

The problem is an "artifacting" effect of the graphics almost blurring momentarily, then the game snapping back into life.  It can be bad enough to be unplayable.  My quick test for this now is to quickly scroll up and down as fast as I can on the Xbox home screen.

I swapped the switches, swapped cables, tried new cables, turned off the energy saving mode on my NIC to no avail.  Every other device on both sides of the powerline function absolutely fine, I can stream 1080p content without issue for hours on end.

One magical day I figured it out.

The way i fixed it was swapping out the Netgear GS108 switch which the Xbox One S is connected to, I swapped it for any old switch I had lying around (It happened to be a Netgear WNR2000v2 which had DD-WRT installed on it).  I still get SOME artifacts,(update, 2nd session of gaming had no artifacts) but 95% less than I had before, and an amount i've always experienced when game streaming, so this is acceptable to me.  Eventually will replace my other Netgear switch in a bid to eliminate all artifacts, but I thought I'd post in the unlikely event someone is suffering the same problem as myself!

Top reasons for blocking adverts with Pi Hole

I have Pi Hole installed on my combined front and backend media server in order to reduce the amount of adverts I see to great effect.

I've listed here the reasons I love using Pi Hole.

1) YouTube clients

My TV has a Youtube client installed which gets a lot of use in my house.  The way they play adverts is most times a new video is chosen, and also DURING a long video.  Pi Hole makes the Youtube app act as though adverts don't exist.  The videos never pause, I don't get the slightest of delays when launching a video.  Long may that continue!

2) Web browsing

This is probably the most common use of Pi-Hole and simply put, it's astonishing how much of your traffic is adverts.  Furthermore, some pages are unusable to me caked in adverts.  Step in Pi Hole.  It's a sad state of affairs but using this technology is the only way I can make such sites accessible.

3) Mobile apps (especially kids games)

One of the best outcomes of having no adverts has been with my young (toddler) child playing games on my Android phone.  I don't know if you've ever played a low quality free game from the Play Store, but a LOT of games lately seem to have a two pronged approach to getting money.  One is In App Purchases which are often big shiny attractive buttons which a toddler is likely to gravitate towards.  (The ethics behind earning revenue from tactics like these is akin to a con man in my opinion.)

The second way these games are monitised is the use of constant, intrusive and often colourful bright banner adverts.   It's sometimes difficult even as a phone literate guy with good eyesight to figure out how to close full screen adverts to get back to the game, they're that intrusive.  Pi-Hole blocks these adverts, making cheap, poor quality games slightly more bearable.

I'm a huge fan of this software.  You can chat about it with a friendly bunch at Reddit

Review of Stealth Streams IPTV Service

StealthStreams came recommended to me from somewhere (Wish I could remember where), and they have a free trial (24 hours).  Messages were responded to very quickly and politely via Facebook, which makes it easy to get up and running quickly.

The Kodi addon is easy to download; Stealth Streams operate their own repository, which means the addon should stay updated.

Flicking through channels quickly gives a great impression, not only are the channel changes extremely fast, but the picture is of a high standard, in some cases 1080p resolution.

A really nice (and uncommon) feature offered by Stealth Streams is the iVue TV Guide integration.  Full EPG TV guides offer a far more pleasant way to browse through channels.  This was very simply achieved with two stages:

1. Download and install the iVue addon (a login is required for this from their Facebook page)
2. Run the iVue wizard from within the StealthStreams addon

Overall StealthSteams offers a very good package for the money with a solid support offered via Facebook chat.  The iVue functionality is the icing on the cake and is a premium IPTV service well worth checking out.

My Ultimate IPTV solution

I've been having a think about what my favourite setup would look like for a premium IPTV provider.

It'd consist of:

Kodi as the front end. 

I love Kodi and use it daily to view TV Shows, Movies, Radio, Live TV and Pictures.

Kodi's native Live TV Interface.  

Although I'm new to iVue and I really like it so far, i'm used to the native Live TV EPG and it's controls.  It's got it's flaws but it's one of the things that's being worked on by the Kodi developers.

Utopia would be being able to customise which type of tuner (IP or DVB) has priority, e.g. I could set BBC HD through my DVB tuner as priority over the IP equivalent, as it's likely I'd get a higher bitrate through the DVB-T2 tuner than the IPTV service.

Timeshift and PVR functionality.  

I currently use TVheadend for my terrestrial channels and one of the things I've never quite sussed out is the Timeshift functionality, but as a PVR it is rock solid.

If anyone's got any thoughts or suggestions to achieve the dream scenario, please do comment or get me on Twitter @pww_tech !

IPTV providers

Here is a list of IPTV providers, I am mainly focusing on providers who provide Kodi integration.  You will find links to them and some headline facts which you may find useful when trying to integrate IPTV with PVR functionality in Kodi for example:

Provider Name	1 Month Cost	1 Year Cost	Number of Channels	Kodi app	Free trial available?	Trial limitations	Notes
Iptvsubs.is	$13	$132	500+	Iptvsubs own		1 day
Iptv66	$12	$105	833	PVR Stalker NFPS		N/A
IPTV Choice	€15	€100	1200	PVR IPTV Simple		3 hours
Rapid IPTV		€90	2000+	PVR IPTV Simple		VLC only, 24 hours
NTV.mx	€24.95			NTV plugin		N/A	Not available in UK
Stream TV Box	£10.99	£84	266	StreamTVBox from Xunity		N/A	£4 for 2 days
Satellite BG		$299	230+			N/A	Needs MAG box
MBOX	£17	£160	1200+	MBOX HDTV plugin		N/A
Tecfront	$20CAD	$204CAD	458+			N/A	Canadian provider
Alpha CS	€15	€120	240+	PVR IPTV Simple		36 hours
Premium-IPTV	€1 9	€95	600+			N/A	Offer of lifetime access €99
Sports Donkey	£20	£50	175+	Sports Donkey own		N/A	1 day pass £5, 1 week £10
Ruya	£17	£175 (13m)	780	Ruya own		N/A	1 day pass £2 (Mon-Thu)
Dexter	£9	£104	~400	Dexter own		N/A
Stealth Streams	£10	120	228	Stealth  Streams own		24 hours	Sports only £7/month

Feel free to share your experiences of any of the providers and their services on this blog!

Welcome!

Welcome to my Technology tips and news blog!




I'm going to be posting about technology trends e.g. Kodi, Computers, Media Centres, IPTV, Nintendo, Xbox, CCTV, Security software, Raspberry Pi developments, gadgets and anything that interests me, in the hope that it interests someone else too!


I am based in the UK so please bear that in mind when reading the blog posts.  Some of the items will be tailored, for example if certain services are region blocked against the UK I may not even mention them.  All views are my own