MCYSEKA-Maritime Cyber Security Knowledge Archive

I want to revive my old unused DSC system, either by re-using what I have or perhaps adding some way to app-enable it, like with HomeKit or similar. I like the hardwired bits and I don’t mind the LCD panels. I just want to be able to monitor the system and also arm/disarm it remotely and see a log of trip events and so forth. So I’m looking for suggestions on what to do that’s cost effective and can also make up for the sins of whoever installed this thing as I work out the kinks.

So here’s the backstory on the system itself and my journey getting it back up:

I have an existing wired system, a DSC 1832 with two PC5108 expanders for a total of 24 zones, plus two LCD panels and 2 CO/smoke detectors (independently run from the other 9 detectors in the house). This system has not been on in years. Several of the zones are water flooding sensors in bathrooms and HVAC closets. But they went to town wiring up every window casement in the house and there are a lot of them. They ran them in series for various rooms/areas. There are also a couple of motion detectors. There’s no telephone line hooked up for communication but rather some kind of PC-Net device called “IP Datatel Broadband Alarm Transmitter”. I can’t find a lot of documentation for this thing but it looks like it was either used for self monitoring or maybe the local alarm company here used these. It is not currently hooked up to the internet.

Testing the zone wiring with a multimeter there is no EOL resistor on any zone. I later found the panel was programmed in the “NC Loop” mode rather than using SEOL/DEOL.

So once I powered everything back up and replaced the 12V batteries, the first thing I had to do was wire up an Arduino to brute force the installer code, because I didn’t know it. That worked great. Then I went through writing down all the programming information in the system.

The odd thing I found was they never assigned zones 9-24 to the partition 1 mask (the only active partition). As far as I can tell these zones never worked or would have alarmed anything. But I’m wondering if there may have been some reason for this, or just incompetence. For example they did not appear in the bypass list. But they did go and name all the zones with labels, so once I added them to partition 1 they showed up in the LCD panels. Is there any reason someone would intentionally do this?

The next thing I found was one of the zone expanders (9-16) seems to be faulty, or I’m missing something in the programming. It appears in the list of supervised modules (in 903), the bypassable zones appear in the bypass list, but it does not seem to actually report tripped zones at all. I can confirm a zone is tripped with a multimeter on the screw terminals on the board. I tested the same on the other expander (17-24) and all of those work and alarm as expected. But I can unplug everything from this board and nothing bubbles up. Should I just replace it or is there something I’m missing? I tested all the diodes and resistors on board and the MOV and PTC, all looked good. Also — if anyone knows what the microswitch button on the PC5108 does, I’m very curious as it’s undocumented. To save myself further waiting I went ahead and ordered a replacement PC5108, but maybe someone here has a better suggestion.

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Ultimately I want to get this back online and reporting with some kind of app support. Based on reading around here the common recommendations are to either replace the thing with a Qolsys model (which to be honest sometimes comes off as sales-y in some of the comments I see) or use an add-on module from Alarm.com. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.