Had a customer show me his homemade alarm panel last Tuesday

Guy in Phoenix built his own system using old car batteries and a raspberry pi, said he didn't trust any of the big companies. He rigged it to text him through some script he wrote, and it actually worked fine for 3 years. Anyone else run into customers who think they can build a better system than what we install?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_sam7d ago

Wait, has anyone considered that maybe these DIY guys are actually onto something about reliability, just not in the way they think? I mean @grace_campbell's story about the flood is brutal, but that's a placement problem not a core design flaw. The real issue nobody talks about is how hard it is to get these homemade panels to actually update their own firmware or security patches. I had a customer in Denver whose custom Pi system was amazing until a zero-day exploit hit his router and his whole network got bricked. Pro systems at least have a company pushing updates, but his setup was stuck on a script he wrote 4 years ago. These guys always forget that building it isn't the hard part, keeping it safe over time is.

grace_campbell7d ago

Heard a similar story from my buddy Dave up in Portland. His neighbor built a whole security setup from scratch with some old car parts and a little computer board, kept saying the pros were just ripping people off. Worked like a charm for two years until his basement flooded and the whole thing shorted out.

jasonf177d ago

Well now, that's a cautionary tale if I ever heard one. Did your buddy Dave ever figure out if a simple sealant or a different placement would have saved that whole setup, or was it just a case of the thing being doomed from the start? I've tinkered with a few projects myself and learned the hard way that a little waterproofing can make or break something that seems bulletproof on paper. It's funny how a flood can turn a two-year success story into a sad pile of fried electronics. Makes me wonder if there's a middle ground between paying thousands for a pro system and building something so custom it falls apart from a little water.