Virtual Keypad for the Honeywell Vista alarm systems using an ESP32

This Arduino ESP32 sketch provides a virtual keypad web interface using the esp32 as a standalone web server using AES encrypted web socket communications as well as push notifications and control via the Telegram app. All keypad functionality is provided as well as zone display. Using this firmware on an ESP32 will give you basically full control of your alarm system using a virtual keypad from your phone or computer. You do not need any other home control software. You can set it up to send push notifications on any event (such as alarms or faults) to your phone or computer (via Telegram). You can also arm/disarm /etc your system via your own bot on Telegram.

This sketch uses portions of the code from the VirtualKeypad-Web example for DSC alarm systems found in the taligent/dscKeybusInterface respository at: https://github.com/taligentx/dscKeybusInterface/blob/master/examples/esp32/VirtualKeypad-Web/VirtualKeypad-Web.ino.

It was adapted to use my Vista alarm system library at:

https://github.com/Dilbert66/esphome-vistaECP/tree/master/src/vistaEcpInterface

with the addition of two way AES encryption for the web socket and push notification capability for various applications. This firmware uses the Telegram (https://telegram.org) messaging application due to it's ability to control your system remotely using bots in addition to having push capability. All this at no cost!

AES encryption was used instead of https for web server because of the fact that I could not find a decent https server library available for the ESP32. The few that are out there are very slow and buggy, in addition to the fact that https requires the use of SSL certificates which are a pain to use and setup especially if you use self signed versions.

With AES encryption on the background web socket, we achieve very fast and full encrypted communications between the ESP32 and the web client using mimimal resources. There is no need to encrypt the client software as there is no sensitive data there. The passcode remains at the client side and is only used as a key to decrypt the communications channel. The stronger the password used, the stronger the encryption will be. For the purposes of this application, this should be more than adequate.

Communications with the remote telegram service uses standard https TLS encryption using the SSL client library.

This application will only work on the ESP32 due to it's large amount of resources and the fact that we can easily run async tasks on it. I've tried to get it to work on the esp8266 but it's resources were totally inadequate for this application.

The web server , telegram notifications and bot cmd processes are all running independently in their own async tasks and do not affect the vista library communications.

Setup for the Arduino IDE.

1. Install the following libraries directly from each Github repository:

      1. ESPAsyncWebServer: https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer
      2. AsyncTCP: https://github.com/me-no-dev/AsyncTCP
   

2. Install the filesystem uploader tools to enable uploading web server files:

     1. https://github.com/me-no-dev/arduino-esp32fs-plugin
   

3. Install the following libraries, available in the Arduino IDE Library Manager and the Platform.io Library Registry:

      1. ArduinoJson: https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson
      2. AESLib: https://github.com/suculent/thinx-aes-lib
   

4. Set the AES encryption password that will be used to login to the panel and also used as a key for encrypting all web socket communications between the ESP and the browser.

5. If desired, update the DNS hostname in the sketch. By default, this is set to "vistakeypad" and the web interface will be accessible at: http://vistakeypad.local

6. Copy all .h and cpp files from the https://github.com/Dilbert66/esphome-vistaECP/tree/master/src/vistaEcpInterface repository location to your sketch directory or into a subdirectory within your arduino libraries folder.

7. Upload the sketch. Recommended to use board "ESP32 Dev Module with Minimal SPIFFS partition scheme (190K SPIFFS partition) to get the maximum flash storage for program storage if using OTA.

8. Upload the SPIFFS data containing the web server files (the "data" subdirectory contents):

      1. Arduino IDE: Tools > ESP32 Sketch Data Upload
   

9. Access the virtual keypad web interface by the IP address displayed through the serial output or http://vistakeypad.local (for clients and networks that support mDNS).

10. Once the sketch is loaded and running, any following updates can be done via OTA updates for initial testing.
    See here for an example: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-ota-updates-with-arduino-ide-over-the-air/

NOTE: I do not normally recommended leaving the ability to do OTA updates active on a production system. Once done testing, you should either disable it by commenting out "useOTA" or set a good long passcode. Be aware that for uploading sketch data (web server files) via OTA, you cannot have a password set. Once all testing is done, you can then set your password of choice or disable the feature.